# Confidence in Your Beliefs



## Polednice

*N.B.* This thread is _not_ a place to discuss the validity of any beliefs in particular. It is for the consideration of having beliefs in general, whether they are political, religious, or otherwise.

My question boils down to this: do you ever worry that you could be completely wrong?

Something that becomes readily apparent whenever we have our discussions on politics or religion is that, trolls aside, everyone is genuine. It's not possible for everyone to be _right_, but everyone is sincere. Everyone is convinced that their rationale is superior. When I see someone arguing for something I don't believe, I see holes in their arguments; equally, when I am arguing in what I think is a coherent manner about what I hold to be true, others will see holes where I don't see them.

So how can we be sure that our views are aligned with the truth, and not just the product of our circumstances?

I see religious views as being particularly vulnerable because they are almost always quite obviously a product of geography. I imagine that some of my political views cannot help but be informed by my working class background, ill-health and sexuality, making me more left-wing, but I also think that I am well-equipped with modes of critical thinking so that I can analyse arguments and positions from first principles, without bias, should I need to.

People without that basis of critical thought - people who accept what they are told, either from their peers or what they deem to be a higher power - are left open to having their views on the world lack integrity. They will be sincere, genuine, and heartfelt, but they will always run a greater risk of their dearly held beliefs being utterly wrong.


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## violadude

I always worry that I am actually wrong lol that's why I have kind of taken a philosophy that says that I just can't truly know what is right. I mean how can you? For example, when there is one ecenomic "expert" who says one thing, and another economic "expert" who says the complete opposite, who the hell is right?? In all honesty, whoever controls our media (basically our source for information) controls our world and that is scary because they can basically feed us any ** statistic information they want and we have no choice but to believe it, what else are we going to believe? We can believe they are lying to us, but what is the next step as far as what to believe?

Eh I hope I make sense here....it is 2:30 in the morning here in the USA and I feel like I am sounding very incoherent. I will try to type something better tomorrow haha


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## violadude

Expanding on my idea, I think it is important to get out into the world and try to see what is going on for yourself the best you can. Not everything can be seen, but some things can. 

A good example is over here in the US, as I am sure you have heard, there is the right wing protest group that are called the "tea party" and then there is the left wing protest group called the "occupy movement." I have talked to people from both sides (actual people, not politicians or talk show hosts), those that identify themselves with the tea party group and those that identify themselves with the occupy crowd, and ya know what I found? They actually aren't all that different...

Sure there are quite a few ideological differences, and a few differences on how to take care of the problem. But most of the people I have talked to from either side at least agree on what the problem is! (greedy politicians, too many hand outs and bail outs, so called "crony capitalism"), and both sides agree on a couple common solutions to the problem... which is a start.

But it pisses me off that these stupid-*** conservative and liberal media groups (Fox, MSNBC, some programs on CNN, you name it) focus so much on what divides the two protest groups instead of what can bring us together. They each go to the opposite group and pick the stupidest members of said group and only show them to try and make the case that the whole protest group is invalid, when in reality there is validity to both. But the more they try to divide the people of America like this with pointless ideology instead of trying to see common ground between the groups, the farther we get from coming to agreement and solving this mess we have over here.


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## Delicious Manager

Being wrong is not something I often worry about


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## Chi_townPhilly

Polednice said:


> *N.B.* This thread is _not_ a place to discuss the validity of any beliefs in particular.





Polednice said:


> I see religious views as being particularly vulnerable...


Violated your own injunction- before the end of the very first post, even.

So, would you like to have a conversation about the extent of my beliefs (e.g.: how close does my faith come to "mustard-seed" size?), or would you like to have a conversation that induces people to respond to the perceived vulnerabilities of their viewpoint(s)? Because if you're looking to engage in the former, your penultimate paragraph's wording was not particularly well-chosen...


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## norman bates

about religion i'm agnostic, so how can i be wrong?


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## violadude

norman bates said:


> about religion i'm agnostic, so how can i be wrong?


Lol there was a new south park episode last week that had "militant agnostics" in it...it was great. 

Anyway, back to the topic. lol


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## graaf

I try not to stick to too hard to my convictions. I'm happy to say that I've reduced my emotional attachment to my beliefs significantly. Some of the ways I did that is by ditching most of the "more theoretical" attitudes, sticking to "more practical" ones (and personal experience is much harder to bring into question), learning how to say "I don't know", etc. Once you do all those things, even change of belief is not as radical as it used to be - beliefs about things that are "far too theoretical" are card pyramids anyway...

So, not too worried, no.


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## norman bates

violadude said:


> Lol there was a new south park episode last week that had "militant agnostics" in it...it was great.


i know i have to see it... do you remember the title of the episode?


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## violadude

norman bates said:


> i know i have to see it... do you remember the title of the episode?


Ya it's called "The poor kid"


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## Polednice

Chi_townPhilly said:


> Violated your own injunction- before the end of the very first post, even.
> 
> So, would you like to have a conversation about the extent of my beliefs (e.g.: how close does my faith come to "mustard-seed" size?), or would you like to have a conversation that induces people to respond to the perceived vulnerabilities of their viewpoint(s)? Because if you're looking to engage in the former, your penultimate paragraph's wording was not particularly well-chosen...


Well excuse me for trying to be clear on an abstract topic by using a personal example. Next time, I'll bear in mind that people take things personally when there is no reason to.

I think it's pretty obvious that I was inviting people to argue the basis or importance of critical thinking, or what exactly critical thinking is or should be. I said what, from my perspective, my idea of critical thought permits me to do and think. If people approach beliefs differently, and think that my mode of thought may be bad, then they are free to tell me why. My aim wasn't to criticise religion; it was to try to demonstrate my basis for forming opinions by giving an example.

TOUCHY!


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## Ukko

Your 'idea of critical thought' appears to allow you to apply the sophistry necessary to support your beliefs. This is a very common practice, possibly due at least in part by the malleability of memory. Believe it or not, _Poley_, no insult intended.

[For a synopsis-like article on this subject of memory, see "Out of the Past" by Kathleen McGowan in _Discover_ magazine, July/August 2009 issue.]

What I am trying to suggest here is that postulates previously arrived at - and stored in one's memory - probably need to be periodically examined to determine current validity. It looks like the concept of the 'gentleman's journal' ain't a bad idea; if you work it out and write it down, your memory can't mess with it.

:tiphat:


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## Polednice

I've already accepted that I have biases, and the whole premise of this thread is about not being certain of the relationship between my own sincere beliefs and actual reality, so I wish people would stop thinking that I'm trying to hold my own methods up as superior. I'm asking you to pick holes in it and tell me how you think ffs.


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## violadude

Poor Poley  he can't seem to make a thread without people questioning his motives.


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## Polednice

violadude said:


> Poor Poley  he can't seem to make a thread without people questioning his motives.


I think in threads made by anyone on any subject, there is so much 'psychologising' going on - trying to guess people's motives or uncover some hidden agenda. Let's have a little more intellectual respect for each other.


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## Igneous01

The confidence in my beliefs comes from me making the choice to believe them. However that doesn't mean that I stop disproving or questioning my beliefs. Simply put, there is evidence for and against a theory, no matter how small, just as theres always opinion for and against something. In the end, its you making the choice to believe it or not. And a good thing too! You would not be you without the ability of choice (unless you believe choice does not exist, but you still make the choice to believe it).

So simply put, our beliefs are what make us human.


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## Ravellian

I don't know anything with absolute confidence.


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## Polednice

Ravellian said:


> I don't know anything with absolute confidence.


I think most people would have the humility to say the same. But what gives you a general, if not absolute, confidence in the truth of whatever beliefs you hold?


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## Ukko

When knowledge and faith are combined, absolute confidence is not only possible, it's a requirement.


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## Polednice

Hilltroll72 said:


> When knowledge and faith are combined, absolute confidence is not only possible, it's a requirement.


Why? ........................


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## Ukko

Polednice said:


> Why? ........................


"Why?" 

Are you using the 'Little Boy Who Keeps Asking 'why', tack?

It is what it is.


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## Polednice

Hilltroll72 said:


> "Why?"
> 
> Are you using the 'Little Boy Who Keeps Asking 'why', tack?
> 
> It is what it is.


Hahaha, no, I genuinely don't understand your statement!


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## Igneous01

Polednice said:


> Why? ........................


think about this for a moment:

whats better: the chase? or the catch?


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## Polednice

How about we stop speaking in tongues?


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## Igneous01

Polednice said:


> How about we stop speaking in tongues?


alright, guess that didn't work.

Belief in God, or having faith and knowledge as hilltroll said, is alot like taking the chase. Its mysterious, ambiguous, and exciting, for the thrill of simply pursuing it. You may never truly uncover the answer as to whether or not it was right, but you took the chance and chased on through life with it. Science is alot like that as well, thats why we want to keep asking more questions about the universe, and particles - because we love the chase, we want to pursue knowledge, discover and answer all things mysterious, forever. We dont really want it to end, if mystery suddenly was finished, we wouldn't know what to do with our selves.


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## Polednice

Igneous01 said:


> alright, guess that didn't work.
> 
> Belief in God, or having faith and knowledge as hilltroll said, is alot like taking the chase. Its mysterious, ambiguous, and exciting, for the thrill of simply pursuing it. You may never truly uncover the answer as to whether or not it was right, but you took the chance and chased on through life with it. Science is alot like that as well, thats why we want to keep asking more questions about the universe, and particles - because we love the chase, we want to pursue knowledge, discover and answer all things mysterious, forever. We dont really want it to end, if mystery suddenly was finished, we wouldn't know what to do with our selves.


OK... I don't entirely agree with the first part, but if I were to take it as true, what does this have to do with Hilltroll's earlier assertion about absolute confidence being a requirement?


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## starthrower

Belief is important and central to the human experience. And so is doubt. Dr. Mike is being a tad disingenuous when he sarcastically implies that non believers and doubters assume than those of faith are stupid, gullible rubes. He knows this is a bunch of crap.


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## science

Polednice said:


> I think in threads made by anyone on any subject, there is so much 'psychologising' going on - trying to guess people's motives or uncover some hidden agenda. Let's have a little more intellectual respect for each other.


I would say it the other way around: we each need to have less intellectual respect for ourselves. I'd love to figure out my subconscious biases so that I can counteract them. I always seem to be about 6 years behind my subconscious though.


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## clavichorder

Polednice said:


> I think in threads made by anyone on any subject, there is so much 'psychologising' going on - trying to guess people's motives or uncover some hidden agenda. Let's have a little more intellectual respect for each other.


Oh boy do I agree!

In the context of threads on music I feel this applies just as much and is more sensitive for me than either religion or politics, for which I care little. In personal response to the gist of your original topic, I often am not confident in my own opinions and can be very insecure, so I try to be cool since I have the internet to hide my angry and flustered countenance and then with enough thinking time, I can just write people off as being rude and not considerate of my topic ideas in the first place, instead trying to psychoanalyze me. That turned into a rant. I do try to practice humility even to my own detriment sometimes. Or on a humbler but less genuine note(until I think about it too much), my insecure yet stubborn ideas that look for validity are exposed for their own volatility. Still, why must people insist on being so rude and disrespectful!


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## Ukko

Polednice said:


> Hahaha, no, I genuinely don't understand your statement!


"Knowledge" has somewhat different meanings, depending on who you're talking to. For scientists, the word does not (or at least isn't supposed to) signify anything engraved in stone; the word is often preceded by 'current'. For the faithful, faith provides the stone, and the eternal validity of the knowledge engraved on it.


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## clavichorder

science said:


> I would say it the other way around: we each need to have less intellectual respect for ourselves. I'd love to figure out my subconscious biases so that I can counteract them. I always seem to be about 6 years behind my subconscious though.


There's another perspective. I have to say that this appeals to me when I'm feeling tougher! Good to understand both ideas.


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## Polednice

Hilltroll72 said:


> "Knowledge" has somewhat different meanings, depending on who you're talking to. For scientists, the word does not (or at least isn't supposed to) signify anything engraved in stone; the word is often preceded by 'current'. For the faithful, faith provides the stone, and the eternal validity of the knowledge engraved on it.


OK, so bearing these different definitions in mind, what do you mean by knowledge and faith 'coming together'?


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## science

I don't feel a need for confidence in my beliefs. I don't think I have the kind of beliefs that would be subject to confidence.

I anticipate the objection: you have thoughts, opinions, that is equivalent to having beliefs.

Well, I don't mean "belief" in that way. Let me explain, and please forgive the abundance of words about to follow.

I used to have _real_ beliefs. I was a Christian, I believed things like that Jesus of Nazareth was the 2nd Person of the Triune God incarnate, born of a virgin, crucified and victorious over death in his resurrection, ascended into heaven, and so on. I knew that evidence and reason alone did not prove those assertions true.

So in those days, when I thought about philosophical things, my semi-conscious goal was to prove my beliefs - if not in a strong sense, then at least to prove that my beliefs were "within reason." I reasoned with that end in mind; thought was work. (Subconsciously I think there was even more going on, but it is irrelevant to this point.)

When I finally gave up, I no longer believed anything. It was such a relief intellectually. Emotionally, it was a different story, because most of my relationships, my identity, and my sense of meaning in life were all at stake. But intellectually, I just relaxed.

From that time, no assertion has been wrapped up in my identity in such a way that I need it to be true. Whatever appears to be the case, I can just passively accept that it is the case. If/when appearances change (new data or whatever), I just let my mind change.

And my mind has changed on numerous occasions as I've learned new stuff. I went from anti-free-trade to pro-free-trade, from pro-minimum-wage to uncertain, from highly uncertain that global warming was occurring at all to fairly sure that it's happening, and from skeptical that human actions were involved in causing it to suspecting that they are, from weakly suspecting that unions have helped workers to thinking they probably haven't made much difference to believing that they have helped workers very much, from skeptical of claims that the major media are controlled by political interests to fairly sure that they are, from fairly enthusiastic about evolutionary psychology to a bit more wary of it, skeptical of the idea of group selection to a little more suspicious that it has played a role in our evolution, and so on and so on.

But I don't _believe_ in any of those things. I just think, well, X appears to be the case. Or, Y does not appear to be case. Or, there appears to be some weak evidence for Z. When the evidence is ambiguous, when there is some uncertainty, I accept the uncertainty.

Point is, there is no longer any _effort_ in my worldview. Nothing I need to prove, nothing I need to be true, nothing to defend. It's all ok with me. If I find out some information that makes Theravada Buddhism appear to be the true religion, I will believe it. If not, I won't. Same with every other tradition. As far as I am aware, no idea, no intellectual assertion, is connected to my identity in a way that would make it difficult for me to change my mind.

If I catch myself - or if someone points out to me - that my assent to some proposition is stronger than the evidence demands - that is, if I catch myself or someone points out to me that I have any faith in my worldview - my mind would instantly, automatically change.

In that sense, I don't have any beliefs. I have nothing to be confident about or to lack confidence in.

Sorry for all the words, and I want to end with the caveat that in this post I have not been talking about moral claims, which I think are fundamentally non-empirical and therefore not subject to the kind of belief under discussion now.


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## science

clavichorder said:


> Oh boy do I agree!
> 
> In the context of threads on music I feel this applies just as much and is more sensitive for me than either religion or politics, for which I care little. In personal response to the gist of your original topic, I often am not confident in my own opinions and can be very insecure, so I try to be cool since I have the internet to hide my angry and flustered countenance and then with enough thinking time, I can just write people off as being rude and not considerate of my topic ideas in the first place, instead trying to psychoanalyze me. That turned into a rant. I do try to practice humility even to my own detriment sometimes. Or on a humbler but less genuine note(until I think about it too much), my insecure yet stubborn ideas that look for validity are exposed for their own volatility. Still, why must people insist on being so rude and disrespectful!


This is an interesting perspective. Let me think about it and I'll respond later.

For now though, I just want to affirm you: You don't seem to me to have any good reason to be insecure. You seem to be about as intellectually able as anyone else. And so what even if you aren't? Life is not an intelligence contest.


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## GoneBaroque

Two Psychologists meet while walking down the street. The first one said "Good Morning!". The other wondered "What did he mean by that?".


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## Ukko

Polednice said:


> OK, so bearing these different definitions in mind, what do you mean by knowledge and faith 'coming together'?


Knowledge without faith has the 'current' in front of it. Add faith-in-the-knowledge and you have, not just religion really, but also the medieval/early Renaissance acceptance of Aristotelian 'science'. When Aristotle stopped his process at Observation + Conjecture, he had not advanced significantly beyond the processes involved in the Gospels. [The Gospels may or may not add Invention to the mix; I am not opening that can. Aristotle's conjecture often has the flavor of invention - without doubt.]

I apologize for the disconnectedness you may find in my posts. It may be that I see connections that aren't really there. I actually enjoy the affliction most of the time, but there's no reason you should.


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## Polednice

Hilltroll72 said:


> Knowledge without faith has the 'current' in front of it. Add faith-in-the-knowledge and you have, not just religion really, but also the medieval/early Renaissance acceptance of Aristotelian 'science'. When Aristotle stopped his process at Observation + Conjecture, he had not advanced significantly beyond the processes involved in the Gospels. [The Gospels may or may not add Invention to the mix; I am not opening that can. Aristotle's conjecture often has the flavor of invention - without doubt.]
> 
> I apologize for the disconnectedness you may find in my posts. It may be that I see connections that aren't really there. I actually enjoy the affliction most of the time, but there's no reason you should.


OK, I think I understand your point now! No idea why you made it though.


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## Ukko

Polednice said:


> OK, I think I understand your point now! No idea why you made it though.


Which indicates that you don't understand my point - or that my point doesn't exist anywhere but in my head. Either way, 'It is what it is'.


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## Igneous01

just........ let it be man.....................


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## Huilunsoittaja

I definitely believe in the possibility of Christianity not existing. Thus, you can test it just like a theory. That is one of the criteria for actually supporting a theory, that the theory allows for failure. We could possibly living a completely different Metanarrative of some religion that does (or doesn't) exist. We could possibly be the product of chance. If scientists and philosophers want to be honest and perform "good science," they have to view _everything _with the possibility that it could be true. THEN you start making arguments. Tons of scientific arguments already skew their bias with the idea of a real religion is obsolete.

Take the phrase:
"There is no absolute truth."
In saying that, you're literally saying, "There is no absolute truth, _except this phrase_." Thus, it's fundamentally contradictory. Therefore, something _has _to be true in this world. Something, no matter what it is.



Polednice said:


> People without that basis of critical thought - people who accept what they are told, either from their peers or what they deem to be a higher power - are left open to having their views on the world lack integrity. They will be sincere, genuine, and heartfelt, but they will always run a greater risk of their dearly held beliefs being utterly wrong.


Unfortunately, there are too many Christians in this world that do believe just because they are told (I'm picking on Christians because they're the ones that boast the most of its nonexistence in society). It comes from either not understanding the Gospel correctly, or taking everything in life for granted, and there are millions of false Christians in the world today for those reasons. But I am not one of those individuals. For me to deny the existence of God would be to deny the existence of meaning that leads to something greater than myself. I don't want to live for myself. If making a meaning to my life was all up to me, I would fail miserably. I've seen too much of life to say, "it all happened by chance." *NO*. My life is not by chance, nor is it all the product of my "free will." I know through my life that I can say there was/is a great Power that steered me into making decisions that I had no idea would be so good for me until I finally saw it all. I have been so blessed that I literally can't handle thinking about it sometimes and start crying, because I didn't deserve it at all. After everything that's happened to me, how could I possibly deny the existence of God? Perhaps from that perspective you may see how my faith is so strongly motivated. Perhaps it's a motivation you've never felt before, or never thought was possible. What if you were to suddenly let that possibility exist for you?


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## amfortas

Huilunsoittaja said:


> After everything that's happened to me, how could I possibly deny the existence of God? Perhaps from that perspective you may see how my faith is so strongly motivated. Perhaps it's a motivation you've never felt before, or never thought was possible. What if you were to suddenly let that possibility exist for you?


I did for a while (still do, to some extent). But I eventually turned away from organized religion, in part because of claims like this:



Huilunsoittaja said:


> . . . there are millions of false Christians in the world today . . . But I am not one of those individuals.


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## Polednice

Huilunsoittaja said:


> Unfortunately, there are too many Christians in this world that do believe just because they are told (I'm picking on Christians because they're the ones that boast the most of its nonexistence in society). It comes from either not understanding the Gospel correctly, or taking everything in life for granted, and there are millions of false Christians in the world today for those reasons. But I am not one of those individuals. For me to deny the existence of God would be to deny the existence of meaning that leads to something greater than myself. I don't want to live for myself. If making a meaning to my life was all up to me, I would fail miserably. I've seen too much of life to say, "it all happened by chance." *NO*. My life is not by chance, nor is it all the product of my "free will." I know through my life that I can say there was/is a great Power that steered me into making decisions that I had no idea would be so good for me until I finally saw it all. I have been so blessed that I literally can't handle thinking about it sometimes and start crying, because I didn't deserve it at all. After everything that's happened to me, how could I possibly deny the existence of God? Perhaps from that perspective you may see how my faith is so strongly motivated. Perhaps it's a motivation you've never felt before, or never thought was possible. What if you were to suddenly let that possibility exist for you?


I'm not quite sure what to make of this, especially as I think it addresses a personal sense of worth rather than the forming and holding of opinions as I intended in the OP. But, given your own reasons for faith being apparently 'obvious', I take it that it's equally obvious to a poverty-stricken family in a totalitarian state that God simply cannot exist. This is arguing from personal circumstances, which, I think, is a bias like believing what you're told.


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## Huilunsoittaja

Polednice said:


> I'm not quite sure what to make of this, especially as I think it addresses a personal sense of worth rather than the forming and holding of opinions as I intended in the OP. But, given your own reasons for faith being apparently 'obvious', I take it that it's equally obvious to a poverty-stricken family in a totalitarian state that God simply cannot exist. This is arguing from personal circumstances, which, I think, is a bias like believing what you're told.


So if good things happen, I can just easily ignore their meaning as much as I can draw my attention to the bad things? So living in poverty excludes the possibility of anything good happening?

What often happens to Christians is they forget God during the good times, and turn to God during the bad times. Why not turn to God all the time?


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## Polednice

Huilunsoittaja said:


> What often happens to Christians is they forget God during the good times, and turn to God during the bad times. Why not turn to God all the time?


Why not forget God all the time?


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## Igneous01

so just to ask: what God are we talking about here? The one in the clouds? The one on another planet? The one in the mind? The universe?


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## Polednice

--- If people could stop talking about God now and return to the original question, that'd be lovely ---


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## Meaghan

Sometimes, I feel pretty confident that I'm right about everything. The rest of the time, I see the sincerity, intelligence, etc. of people who profoundly disagree with me, and even if I'm unconvinced by their arguments, I'm very uncertain of my own. And then I hope nobody ever gives me too much power because 
1. I would have to spend a lot more time and energy evaluating the accuracy of my beliefs so as not to make a royal mess of things and
2. I might make a royal mess of things.

In my current position of very little power, I am inclined to throw up my hands in confusion, forget about beliefs for stretches of time, and just try to be kind to people.


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## amfortas

Meaghan said:


> . . . and just try to be kind to people.


Ah, well . . . there's your mistake right there.


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## Huilunsoittaja

Polednice said:


> Why not forget God all the time?


Everyone does that already, that's conformity to Society and not individualistic! grarr brarr bagrar! :tiphat:

Oh but I'll help this thread go back to topic. There is an important concept in Science called the Empirical approach to theory. That is the belief that we prove whether or not a theory is true by looking back at personal experience, i.e. standardized tests, case studies, accounts, and other various ways of gathering information. It has revolutionized the world in many ways, and particularly in how we view it today. We can look at the world around us and figure out whether something true is or not. And yet, there have certainly been cases where we couldn't actually tell what was truth based on our finite experience.

Here's a favorite excerpt from Tolstoy's War & Peace, the very last sentences of the epilogue.


> "As with astronomy the difficulty of recognizing the motion of the earth lay in abandoning the immediate sensation of the earth's fixity and of the motion of the planets, so in history the difficulty of recognizing the subjection of personality to the laws of space, time, and cause lies in renouncing the direct feeling of the independence of one's own personality. But as in astronomy the new view said: "It is true that we do not feel the movement of the earth, but by admitting its immobility we arrive at absurdity, while by admitting its motion (which we do not feel) we arrive at laws," so also in history the new view says: "It is true that we are not conscious of our dependence, but by admitting our free will we arrive at absurdity, while by admitting our dependence on the external world, on time, and on cause, we arrive at laws."
> 
> In the first case it was necessary to renounce the consciousness of an unreal immobility in space and to recognize a motion we did not feel; in the present case it is similarly necessary to renounce a freedom that does not exist, and to recognize a dependence of which we are not conscious."


And to take this on a more general level, we humans can't have science, particularly empirical science, solve all the answers, because humans can't always figure out why or why not experiences are happening to them. It may actually take believing the "absurd" to find the truth.

There, some logical debate.


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## Kopachris

Polednice said:


> --- If people could stop talking about God now and return to the original question, that'd be lovely ---


It'd be my pleasure to return to the original question, since this is the first I've seen of this thread (had to go into town to do some banking and grocery shopping today).

Of course I periodically consider the possibility that I'm wrong. I frequently consider the possibility that I'm completely loony (if I told you why, you'd probably say "yes," so don't ask). However, I wouldn't say that I "worry" about it. Ultimately, most of my more questionable beliefs are purely philosophical and have no bearing on my actions or anyone else's, as long as I don't go prancing around, shoving them down other people's throats.


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## Ravellian

Polednice said:


> I think most people would have the humility to say the same. But what gives you a general, if not absolute, confidence in the truth of whatever beliefs you hold?


Enough factual evidence to give a convincing argument. For instance, based on evidence I have gathered through reading and life experience, I have come to the conclusion that all religions are bogus. I generally try to be as objective and rational as possible, being careful not to come to a decision until I have gathered sufficient relevant information. I do my best not to let emotions or superstitions influence my decisions.

It seems obvious to me that most people tend to often come to their conclusions before gathering the necessary relevant information, which is frustrating.


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## Elgarian

Polednice said:


> do you ever worry that you could be completely wrong?


I don't _worry_ about it (as you put it), but I'm simply aware that all of us, myself included, are very nearly completely wrong about very nearly everything.

Every few years I get the urge to drag out my philosophy books, and have another go, working my way from Plato through to Wittgenstein. I think I make a little progress, each time. And the lesson I learn above all concerns the limitations of reasoning. I encounter the immense attraction of certain philosophies that seem to provide a coherent answer, only to encounter its subsequent refutation. The consequence of contemplating the thinking of the greatest minds over 2,500 years is to reinforce the fact of how very little I know; how little any of us can know. You might think that makes the exercise a waste of time. Not so - it teaches me about the traps into which our thinking so easily falls: category errors, for example, which invalidate virtually every discussion about the nature of reality, whether it be based on scientism (at one end of the spectrum) or religion (at the other). It teaches me the limitations of what we can expect to learn from the application of rational thought _at all_. It teaches me that even the most fundamental of our common sense beliefs (such as the relation between cause and effect) are unprovable. And just when all the layers of the Great Onion of Knowledge seem to have been peeled away to leave nothing, it teaches me (thanks, David Hume), to shrug my shoulders at the abyss that confronts us all (whether we're aware of it or not), and go and eat my dinner.

All my 'beliefs' are based on mental models of the world that are certainly false. Doesn't matter, because if I set up effective models I can function pretty well. I have a good enough mental map of this cottage pie to know that can fix my hunger by eating it. If I want to go to the moon, no problem. I can use Newton's Laws to work out how to get there, and it will work. But don't let's fool ourselves into thinking that we know in some fundamental sense what that cottage pie really _is_; and don't let's be silly enough to believe that Newton's Laws are fundamentally 'true' just because they work pretty well. (As a matter of fact, we know that Newton's Laws are fundamentally wrong!)

We might think - it's very tempting, and when I was very much younger I believed it myself - that science offers the best shot at 'the truth' that we're likely to get. But what science offers is not the truth, but predictability. It offers mental maps of a very particular sort which enable us to answer very particular kinds of questions in very particular ways that are very useful to us. But even then, even within its limited brief, every scientific statement is provisional. The scientific method itself is founded in scepticism - sceptism even about its own very best theories - so that no sooner have we set up the very best map we can, we immediately set about finding ways of refuting it. That's how science works. It creates better and better maps. What we must never do is suppose that the maps are the world itself.

Each person faces an existential choice: How to live a life? I've been educated (and engaged in research) as a scientist. I've read the philosophies of the greatest thinkers; I've contemplated the art of the greatest artists, writers and musicians; I've tried to understand something of the great religions. And the outcome of this is that my life has been in many ways enormously rich, because these activities have provided me with so many exciting and fundamentally different ways of looking at the world. But the more I experience, the more I recognise how little I know. How little I _can_ know. How little _anyone_ can know.

As Charles Williams said: all one can do is decide, for oneself, what to believe. And that's about it, really.


----------



## CountessAdele

I think about being wrong all the time. I remember I was horrible in debate at school because I always thought the pro and con sides had good points. I'm very aware of my own ignorance too, there is a lot I don't know. And I'm definately not in a postion to tell anyone else what to believe. And there are only three things that I absoultly believe 100%, which I won't mention.


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## amfortas

Am I ignorant? I don't know.


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## Elgarian

amfortas said:


> Am I ignorant? I don't know.


How can you be so sure?


----------



## amfortas

Elgarian said:


> How can you be so sure?


Damn! And I was so certain of my uncertainty there for a minute.

Now I'm not sure. Or am I?


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## HarpsichordConcerto

I'm more interested in knowing the impact of me being wrong, rather than whether I am wrong or not. In the real world, this is what people really prefer to know - the impact of you being wrong.


----------



## Dodecaplex

Elgarian said:


> I don't _worry_ about it (as you put it), but I'm simply aware that all of us, myself included, are very nearly completely wrong about very nearly everything.
> 
> Every few years I get the urge to drag out my philosophy books, and have another go, working my way from Plato through to Wittgenstein. I think I make a little progress, each time. And the lesson I learn above all concerns the limitations of reasoning. I encounter the immense attraction of certain philosophies that seem to provide a coherent answer, only to encounter its subsequent refutation. The consequence of contemplating the thinking of the greatest minds over 2,500 years is to reinforce the fact of how very little I know; how little any of us can know. You might think that makes the exercise a waste of time. Not so - it teaches me about the traps into which our thinking so easily falls: category errors, for example, which invalidate virtually every discussion about the nature of reality, whether it be based on scientism (at one end of the spectrum) or religion (at the other). It teaches me the limitations of what we can expect to learn from the application of rational thought _at all_. It teaches me that even the most fundamental of our common sense beliefs (such as the relation between cause and effect) are unprovable. And just when all the layers of the Great Onion of Knowledge seem to have been peeled away to leave nothing, it teaches me (thanks, David Hume), to shrug my shoulders at the abyss that confronts us all (whether we're aware of it or not), and go and eat my dinner.
> 
> All my 'beliefs' are based on mental models of the world that are certainly false. Doesn't matter, because if I set up effective models I can function pretty well. I have a good enough mental map of this cottage pie to know that can fix my hunger by eating it. If I want to go to the moon, no problem. I can use Newton's Laws to work out how to get there, and it will work. But don't let's fool ourselves into thinking that we know in some fundamental sense what that cottage pie really _is_; and don't let's be silly enough to believe that Newton's Laws are fundamentally 'true' just because they work pretty well. (As a matter of fact, we know that Newton's Laws are fundamentally wrong!)
> 
> We might think - it's very tempting, and when I was very much younger I believed it myself - that science offers the best shot at 'the truth' that we're likely to get. But what science offers is not the truth, but predictability. It offers mental maps of a very particular sort which enable us to answer very particular kinds of questions in very particular ways that are very useful to us. But even then, even within its limited brief, every scientific statement is provisional. The scientific method itself is founded in scepticism - sceptism even about its own very best theories - so that no sooner have we set up the very best map we can, we immediately set about finding ways of refuting it. That's how science works. It creates better and better maps. What we must never do is suppose that the maps are the world itself.
> 
> Each person faces an existential choice: How to live a life? I've been educated (and engaged in research) as a scientist. I've read the philosophies of the greatest thinkers; I've contemplated the art of the greatest artists, writers and musicians; I've tried to understand something of the great religions. And the outcome of this is that my life has been in many ways enormously rich, because these activities have provided me with so many exciting and fundamentally different ways of looking at the world. But the more I experience, the more I recognise how little I know. How little I _can_ know. How little _anyone_ can know.
> 
> As Charles Williams said: all one can do is decide, for oneself, what to believe. And that's about it, really.


Now that I've been studying physics for a while, reading that post was quite a bummer. Especially the part about how you believed science was the best shot at truth when you were younger, and how _I_ think the exact same way right now!
Hmm, should I ignore what you're saying and wait and see whether my ideas will change over time as I mature just like how you did? Or should I absorb the wisdom of the previous generation and build up on it?

Just thinking it out loud, really . . .


----------



## Elgarian

Dodecaplex said:


> Hmm, should I ignore what you're saying and wait and see whether my ideas will change over time as I mature just like how you did? Or should I absorb the wisdom of the previous generation and build up on it?


Neither (is my advice). I'm a physicist too; and both my own experience, and that of other physicists I know, is that because physics digs down to the deepest and most fundamental roots of what we think of as real, it raises certain philosophical issues of 'meaning' at a fundamental level that the other sciences don't; or not so much. The scientific materialists tend to be chemists and biologists; physicists are more doubtful of the meaning of what they find, in my experience.

I'm aware that that looks like a mere dogmatic preference for my own (and your) branch of science, but in defence I'd point, for example, to the Copenhagen Interpretation of quantum mechanics. Only physicists, I'd maintain, could so clearly see, and so willingly accept, the fundamental ambiguity and uncertainty of what their theories were implying. What I'm saying, then, is that your own engagement with physics will inevitably lead you to question the meaning of what you're doing, and what it implies. What you make of those discoveries will then be something personal and different. You'll decide in your own way what to believe.


----------



## science

Elgarian said:


> We might think - it's very tempting, and when I was very much younger I believed it myself - that science offers the best shot at 'the truth' that we're likely to get. But what science offers is not the truth, but predictability. It offers mental maps of a very particular sort which enable us to answer very particular kinds of questions in very particular ways that are very useful to us. But even then, even within its limited brief, every scientific statement is provisional. The scientific method itself is founded in scepticism - sceptism even about its own very best theories - so that no sooner have we set up the very best map we can, we immediately set about finding ways of refuting it. That's how science works. It creates better and better maps. What we must never do is suppose that the maps are the world itself.


Does the mean that no map is true?

I would describe a map as true if it portrays the territory accurately - I'd say we're justified in calling the map true if no one can show that it fails to portray the territory accurately.

I don't mean of course that the map has to show every detail: if it doesn't pretend to show us elevation, it's not a false map for that.


----------



## Elgarian

science said:


> Does the mean that no map is true?


No. It means _it's a map_. Using the map you can predict (if it's a good map), that if you travel north from the city of X, you'll get to the city of Y. My point is that the map is one thing, and the journey from X to Y is quite another.

As for the 'true' issue - let me point you again to the Newton's Laws example. You can use Newton's laws to build a space ship that will get you to the moon and back. So Newton's laws provide a damn good map, I'd say.

But we know Newton's laws are fundamentally wrong. The notion 'if useful, therefore true' doesn't hold water.


----------



## Elgarian

Dodecaplex said:


> Now that I've been studying physics for a while, reading that post was quite a bummer. Especially the part about how you believed science was the best shot at truth when you were younger, and how _I_ think the exact same way right now!


Just an extra thought, after writing my previous post. The best favour you could do yourself is to read a bit about Karl Popper's ideas on the philosophy of science. Popper's invaluable when it comes to building up an accurate idea of what is really going on when we do science. Another useful notion to look at is Thomas Kuhn's idea of 'paradigm shifts' - which gives short shrift to one's naive notions of science as a steady rational progression away from ignorance and towards the truth!


----------



## Dodecaplex

Elgarian said:


> Just an extra thought, after writing my previous post. The best favour you could do yourself is to read a bit about Karl Popper's ideas on the philosophy of science. Popper's invaluable when it comes to building up an accurate idea of what is really going on when we do science. Another useful notion to look at is Thomas Kuhn's idea of 'paradigm shifts' - which gives short shrift to one's naive notions of science as a steady rational progression away from ignorance and towards the truth!


Thanks! 
I'll be sure to remind the scientific community of Kuhn's works once I'm able to shamelessly violate the 1st law of thermodynamics.

Perpetual motion machines are coming, folks!


----------



## science

Elgarian said:


> No. It means _it's a map_. Using the map you can predict (if it's a good map), that if you travel north from the city of X, you'll get to the city of Y. My point is that the map is one thing, and the journey from X to Y is quite another.
> 
> As for the 'true' issue - let me point you again to the Newton's Laws example. You can use Newton's laws to build a space ship that will get you to the moon and back. So Newton's laws provide a damn good map, I'd say.
> 
> But we know Newton's laws are fundamentally wrong. The notion 'if useful, therefore true' doesn't hold water.


Sorry dude, whatever you're getting at is going over my head. As far as I can tell Newton's laws are true for many purposes; if they're not true for other purposes, then it's not that they're an inaccurate map but that those purposes require a different map. You've got to match the map to the territory.

If the map doesn't fit the territory it's supposed to describe, we can say it's inaccurate; if it doesn't fit some other territory, it doesn't mean the map is false.


----------



## Igneous01

science said:


> Sorry dude, whatever you're getting at is going over my head. As far as I can tell Newton's laws are true for many purposes; if they're not true for other purposes, then it's not that they're an inaccurate map but that those purposes require a different map. You've got to match the map to the territory.
> 
> If the map doesn't fit the territory it's supposed to describe, we can say it's inaccurate; if it doesn't fit some other territory, it doesn't mean the map is false.


What he means is science is the best framework we currently have. That doesn't mean it completely describes all phenomena in the universe, in fact, no such calculations are possible.

Take a look at Relativity and Quantum Mechanics for example - they cannot agree on the properties of black holes. Einstein's general relativity when calculating the gravity of black holes gives an infinite number, which is irrational for physics, it doesn't describe anything we can understand. Some physicists (like this guy) feel we are back at square 1, yet again.






So from what I understand, Truth is a paradox, it contradicts itself, because the statement "there is no absolute truth" is truthful, yet is not at the same time. Truth could probably be equated to the yin and yang, sharing two principles at the same time. Truth is truthful and dishonest at the same time. And that where my understanding of truth ends for now.


----------



## Sid James

Polednice said:


> ...
> My question boils down to this: do you ever worry that you could be completely wrong?
> 
> ...


Interesting thread.

To briefly answer, I'm out of time for now, I agree with what Hilltroll said here -



Hilltroll72 said:


> ...
> What I am trying to suggest here is that postulates previously arrived at - and stored in one's memory - probably need to be periodically examined to determine current validity. It looks like the concept of the 'gentleman's journal' ain't a bad idea; if you work it out and write it down, your memory can't mess with it.


It's a matter of refining my opinions in line with current thought. And of course developing as a person across time. Nobody stays exactly the same.

Eg. in terms of music, a while back I'd never of thought I'd be listening to the music of eg. J.S. Bach and some others, who I'm quite liking now. It's a matter of pushing myself a bit, being a bit flexible. I'm no longer the odd one out amongst my colleagues some friends, and acquaintances who like Bach while I always told them I didn't that much. He maybe won't be my favourite but things like his solo cello suites and violin partitas and sonatas have really taken me to a higher level than I thought they could. Which is logical since I've been a fan of chamber music for a long time. Sometimes a little change is all it takes. Evolution not revolution.

That's just a musical example, to keep religion out of the equation...


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## kv466

I hardly worry about such things as I am seldom wrong about anything


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## Elgarian

science said:


> Sorry dude, whatever you're getting at is going over my head. As far as I can tell Newton's laws are true for many purposes; if they're not true for other purposes, then it's not that they're an inaccurate map but that those purposes require a different map. You've got to match the map to the territory.
> 
> If the map doesn't fit the territory it's supposed to describe, we can say it's inaccurate; if it doesn't fit some other territory, it doesn't mean the map is false.


I think I've become a victim of the inadequacy of my own analogy. The map analogy, naturally, only holds so far. And also my use of language was too loose: To be clear, I should have said that we know Newtonian _physics_ is wrong.

Newtonian physics has been enormously successful at predicting outcomes, but it's based on a set of fundamental assumptions that we know are wrong. (That is, we can make certain predictions using Newtonian physics that fail - famously, for example, the orbit of Mercury can't be accurately predicted using Newtonian physics). Historically, this is how Relativity came to supplant Newtonian physics as the best model we have.

In this kind of discussion it's crucially important for everyone to understand the meaning of the words that are being used, and we're throwing around words like 'true', 'accurate', and so on as if they mean the same thing. We both agree that a theory that accurately predicts outcomes is a good one. What I insist on, however, is that we have no assurance that the theory actually mimics what's really happens in nature - witness the Newtonian physics argument.

A man gives me a magic box which can't be opened to look inside it. You put a blue ball into the box and it comes out of a hole on the other side with its colour changed to red. I try to make a model of his box, and eventually succeed. It works accurately - when you put in a blue ball, it comes out red. Do I know therefore how the original box worked? Of course not.

This is an even cruder analogy than the map idea, but the basic principle is that just because we can find a way of mimicking the behaviour of nature using physical models, that doesn't mean that nature actually works that way. The thousands of discarded theories that litter the history of science are testament to that. I'm not in any sense 'knocking' science - it's an immensely powerful tool. I'm just describing what it actually _is_, and acknowledging that it's _not _the truth-finding mechanism that I might like it to be. And all these points are not my own, I should add, but merely extracted from basic ideas in the history and philosophy of science.


----------



## science

Igneous01 said:


> What he means is science is the best framework we currently have. That doesn't mean it completely describes all phenomena in the universe, in fact, no such calculations are possible.


I'd guess that's too obvious an idea to require such elusive language.



Igneous01 said:


> Take a look at Relativity and Quantum Mechanics for example - they cannot agree on the properties of black holes. Einstein's general relativity when calculating the gravity of black holes gives an infinite number, which is irrational for physics, it doesn't describe anything we can understand. Some physicists (like this guy) feel we are back at square 1, yet again.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> So from what I understand, Truth is a paradox, it contradicts itself, because the statement "there is no absolute truth" is truthful, yet is not at the same time. Truth could probably be equated to the yin and yang, sharing two principles at the same time. Truth is truthful and dishonest at the same time. And that where my understanding of truth ends for now.


Quantum physics and relativity are, like any theories (or "maps" or whatever) incomplete. I know it's something like impossible to combine them; I've read the famous books on this stuff. I might even get around to that video later. Is that Michio Kaku?

I just don't know what Elgarian was talking about.


----------



## science

Elgarian said:


> I think I've become a victim of the inadequacy of my own analogy. The map analogy, naturally, only holds so far. And also my use of language was too loose: To be clear, I should have said that we know Newtonian _physics_ is wrong.
> 
> Newtonian physics has been enormously successful at predicting outcomes, but it's based on a set of fundamental assumptions that we know are wrong. (That is, we can make certain predictions using Newtonian physics that fail - famously, for example, the orbit of Mercury can't be accurately predicted using Newtonian physics). Historically, this is how Relativity came to supplant Newtonian physics as the best model we have.
> 
> In this kind of discussion it's crucially important for everyone to understand the meaning of the words that are being used, and we're throwing around words like 'true', 'accurate', and so on as if they mean the same thing. We both agree that a theory that accurately predicts outcomes is a good one. What I insist on, however, is that we have no assurance that the theory actually mimics what's really happens in nature - witness the Newtonian physics argument.
> 
> A man gives me a magic box which can't be opened to look inside it. You put a blue ball into the box and it comes out of a hole on the other side with its colour changed to red. I try to make a model of his box, and eventually succeed. It works accurately - when you put in a blue ball, it comes out red. Do I know therefore how the original box worked? Of course not.
> 
> This is an even cruder analogy than the map idea, but the basic principle is that just because we can find a way of mimicking the behaviour of nature using physical models, that doesn't mean that nature actually works that way. The thousands of discarded theories that litter the history of science are testament to that. I'm not in any sense 'knocking' science - it's an immensely powerful tool. I'm just describing what it actually _is_, and acknowledging that it's _not _the truth-finding mechanism that I might like it to be. And all these points are not my own, I should add, but merely extracted from basic ideas in the history and philosophy of science.


Since we're evidently going to use philosophical jargon rather than common speech: as far as I'm aware, there is no knowledge ("justified true belief) because we will never actually be certain that any of beliefs are true. More likely we can justify some beliefs, but of course that is a different thing than knowing that they are true.

So in this strict sense, I'm eager to concede that no model or theory is true. Your magic box analogy does pretty well at describing what a model is. Of course it is calculated to reveal the limitations of scientific models, but that's fine. It'd only be fair, though, to point out that your model box would gain a lot of credibility if it could be used predictively: if we put a cat in your model box and a dog comes out, and then exactly the same thing happens with the magic box - over and over and over with as many tests and hard of tests as we can think up - that's a pretty impressive model. We would be justified in having some confidence in it. Strictly speaking we still might be able to trip the model up: our ten kajillionth experiment might prove the model has been wrong. But that's fine. We'll make a new, improved model, and we'll be that much closer to truth, which is (strictly speaking) all we can ever hope for.

Equivalents: I might not actually be in Korea. It might be a clever simulation set up by aliens who've hooked up my brain to some kind of machine. I might not actually be drinking a glass of milk. It might be an artificial concoction created by some chemist so that the maeil company can mike a little more money. For now though, the models telling me that I'm in Korea drinking milk are working pretty well, and that's as close as I'm going to get.

It may be that we've got such a case right now with these particles that are supposed to have traveled faster than the speed of light. What if they have? What if it turns out that no current theory of physics can explain the result of those experiments? People will start talking about how relativity isn't true, but that's careless talk. In the sense you mean, probably no theory about the world can be true, and in the sense that ordinary people mean, relativity will still be true as long as we apply it to situations it describes accurately - just like Newtonian physics, which for all your saying is not wrong. F still equals MA. Saying it's wrong because it doesn't explain radiation is almost exactly equivalent to saying a map of Yellowstone is wrong because it doesn't show how to get to McDonalds in Shanghai.

There might be some tiny significance to the difference between "the scientific method is the best way to find out the truth about the world" and "the scientific method makes the most accurate models of the world," but for practical purposes that difference doesn't matter. Strip away the pretentious jargon and all this really amounts to is the old mocking, "But can you _reeeeeaaaaallllllly_ know?" No, not reeeeeaaaalllllly. But practically speaking, our beliefs can be justified by repeated skeptical investigation. If they have been tested ruthlessly to the best of our ability and we cannot find fault with our belief (or model), we are justified in believing it; when we get out of the philosophy seminar and merely need to communicate with each other, there is no better way to use the word "truth."


----------



## Polednice

While any discussion on the philosophy of science can be interesting if people aren't being too obtuse, I think we have to be wary of what we are setting out to achieve by such a discussion, and this is hinted at in science's above comment about _practicality_.

There seem to be two distinct modes of thought about what science does and how we implement it: one is theoretical (the discussion we've seen on the past couple of pages about the limits and function of science) and one is pragmatic (how we actually form beliefs about our world, and how we use science to make things or improve our lives). They are both important, but I think they are incompatible, so we have to be aware of when to shift from one mode of thought to the other.

In our daily lives, and in our general effort to understand our universe, it is not useful to consider the fact that perhaps everything we have ever formulated is only a shadow of reality of varying accuracy. We just need to know if our models predict the right things, if they work consistently, and if they can help us further our understanding. We have to be pragmatic.

Similarly, I think it is extremely important to recognise that by saying science has its limitations and can only ask certain questions - _especially_ when such statements are coated in philosophical language - the opportunity arises for people to say: "Ah, well then, this is a gap that religion must fill." But aren't the questions that science can't answer really just nonsense questions to begin with? The fact is that, though it is useful to recognise the limits of science (which is an entirely appropriate thing to do in a thread about critical thinking), it still must be made clear that it is the _best_ system we have, far better than any other, despite whatever imperfections we might perceive.


----------



## Chi_townPhilly

science said:


> I just don't know what Elgarian is talking about.


All right. That's an experience I sometimes share (though decidedly NOT in this instance). When it happens to me, _I_ find it's best to make an effort to effort to clarify his points in my own mind before weighing in on them- q.v.:


science said:


> Since we're evidently going to use philosophical jargon rather than common speech...


Huh? What?? I found his post to be virtually jargon-free. At any rate, this would be a cheap shot even if accurate- I just find it's weirdly _in_accurate.


science said:


> ...as far as I'm aware, there is no knowledge ("justified true belief) because we will never actually be certain that any of beliefs are true. So, in the strict sense, I'm eager to concede that no model or theory is true.


Now _there_'s a mischaracterization of a position, and it verges on the willful. Our OWN lack of certainty concerning ultimate truth *does not* preclude the possibility that such truth exists.


science said:


> There might be some tiny significance to the difference between "the scientific method is the best way to find out the truth about the world" and "the scientific method makes the most accurate models of the world," but for practical purposes that difference doesn't matter.


A bold proclamation, this... "*the truth about the world*"! Bespeaks to the possibility that you think there's NO world except for the material world. Maybe I'm drawing an assumption that's uncalled for- but really, the only way one can defensibly make a statement about Science being the avenue for definitive truth is IF you believe there's no world except for the material world. For a lot of us, Science is a great hammer for driving the nails of the material world into place, but comes up short in a lot of other significant aspects of our lives. For example:


science said:


> ...our beliefs can be justified by repeated skeptical investigation.


Here, I'll risk a personal question- do you expect that eventually, you'll fall in love again? Do you aspire to settle down with a life-partner? For if you do, I'd _strongly_ suggest that you dispense with the "repeated skeptical investigation" in that area of your life... (and if you can't, then by all means camouflage it during the courtship process). Here, I'm making the presumption that you're unmarried, for if you were married, then I would figure this wouldn't need spelling out...


----------



## Polednice

Chi_townPhilly said:


> A bold proclamation, this... "*the truth about the world*"! Bespeaks to the possibility that you think there's NO world except for the material world. Maybe I'm drawing an assumption that's uncalled for- but really, the only way one can defensibly make a statement about Science being the avenue for definitive truth is IF you believe there's no world except for the material world. For a lot of us, Science is a great hammer for driving the nails of the material world into place, but comes up short in a lot of other significant aspects of our lives.


This is, of course, an even bolder proclamation.  What reason do you have to assert that there is anything beyond the material world? You have no sensory evidence of it and there is no need to use it as an explanation for currently misunderstood phenomena in the material world.



Chi_townPhilly said:


> Here, I'll risk a personal question- do you expect that eventually, you'll fall in love again? Do you aspire to settle down with a life-partner? For if you do, I'd _strongly_ suggest that you dispense with the "repeated skeptical investigation" in that area of your life... (and if you can't, then by all means camouflage it during the courtship process).


I think this is akin to Keats' old lament: "Do not all charms fly / at the mere touch of cold philosophy?" famously in reference to a rainbow. No, Keats, they don't. I'm in love, and I'm fully aware of the 'illusion' of love as a biological necessity for our species. Does that detract from the sensation of love? No. Does it mean that I should be sceptical of my feelings, and work against my instincts? No. It just makes the illusion _even more amazing_ - the fact that it is an illusion at all is a wondrous feat of nature! Why would I want to think that it's some magical property of an unseen world? Consciousness is mysterious, unpredictable, and far, far, far from being explained, but that doesn't mean we have to postulate supernatural agents.

This comes back to my earlier point - being theoretical, and being pragmatic. Any time I like, I can theorise all I want about how my feeling of love is essentially pointless or meaningless. But in my day-to-day existence, when I'm being pragmatic, the sensations are still real; my actions are still influenced by them; and I don't need to invoke fairies.


----------



## science

Chi_townPhilly said:


> All right. That's an experience I sometimes share (though decidedly NOT in this instance). When it happens to me, _I_ find it's best to make an effort to effort to clarify his points in my own mind before weighing in on them- q.v.:Huh? What?? I found his post to be virtually jargon-free. At any rate, this would be a cheap shot even if accurate- I just find it's weirdly _in_accurate.Now _there_'s a mischaracterization of a position, and it verges on the willful. Our OWN lack of certainty concerning ultimate truth *does not* preclude the possibility that such truth exists.A bold proclamation, this... "*the truth about the world*"! Bespeaks to the possibility that you think there's NO world except for the material world. Maybe I'm drawing an assumption that's uncalled for- but really, the only way one can defensibly make a statement about Science being the avenue for definitive truth is IF you believe there's no world except for the material world. For a lot of us, Science is a great hammer for driving the nails of the material world into place, but comes up short in a lot of other significant aspects of our lives. For example:Here, I'll risk a personal question- do you expect that eventually, you'll fall in love again? Do you aspire to settle down with a life-partner? For if you do, I'd _strongly_ suggest that you dispense with the "repeated skeptical investigation" in that area of your life... (and if you can't, then by all means camouflage it during the courtship process). Here, I'm making the presumption that you're unmarried, for if you were married, then I would figure this wouldn't need spelling out...


The jargon involved was a technical use of "knowledge." Still think that was clear.

Whose position was I mischaracterizing? Anyway, I didn't say that truth doesn't exist, but that none of our beliefs can be knowledge (in the strict philosophical sense).

What worlds exist? I'm not married to the idea that the observable world is material, or that it is the only one that exists. But it's the only one we can observe, so, that's that.

Unless perhaps you count an abstract world, which pure math tells us about. I'm not sure that "world" is a good way to describe it. But fine; it's unobservable in some sense, and we still know about it. Granted, if that's the way you wanted to go.

But you were almost certainly referring to a spiritual world hopefully revealed by your religion. If we can observe it, we can hope that science will eventually prove your religion true; and if we can't observe it, I'm not sure what use there is in talking about it.

Of course for the past few hundred years, the world revealed by your religion has turned out not to be the one we observe. So much for "the earth has been set on its foundation" and cetera. That's the root problem behind the creationism debate, as well, so it'd be better to have that discussion in one of those threads.

What is the idea behind the love analogy? What assertion am I supposed to investigate? Her past lovers? What she looks like without makeup? Maybe the idea is that I would stop loving her if I found out some horrible thing about her, and so I'd be better off not finding it out. That raises the question of the supposed bliss of ignorance. I don't know what I think about that, but I suspect I'd rather know the truth and fall out of love. I know this: I want to know the truth about the world, no matter what it is, as well as I can. I lost my religion over it, and it was every bit as painful as the worst breakup I ever had, but I don't regret it at all.

Or was the idea to compare the _feeling_ of being in love to a theory about the world? Perhaps you want to make an analogy between religion and love, so that you love your beliefs and therefore do not want to investigate them critically? I think there may be merit in that diagnosis, but it's not a position I'd want to adopt deliberately.

I really can't make sense of the love analogy.


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## science

Polednice said:


> I think this is akin to Keats' old lament: "Do not all charms fly / at the mere touch of cold philosophy?" famously in reference to a rainbow. No, Keats, they don't. I'm in love, and I'm fully aware of the 'illusion' of love as a biological necessity for our species. Does that detract from the sensation of love? No. Does it mean that I should be sceptical of my feelings, and work against my instincts? No. It just makes the illusion _even more amazing_ - the fact that it is an illusion at all is a wondrous feat of nature! Why would I want to think that it's some magical property of an unseen world? Consciousness is mysterious, unpredictable, and far, far, far from being explained, but that doesn't mean we have to postulate supernatural agents.
> 
> This comes back to my earlier point - being theoretical, and being pragmatic. Any time I like, I can theorise all I want about how my feeling of love is essentially pointless or meaningless. But in my day-to-day existence, when I'm being pragmatic, the sensations are still real; my actions are still influenced by them; and I don't need to invoke fairies.


Ah, that might be what was meant by the love analogy. If so, I think you've responded successfully.


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## Polednice

science said:


> Ah, that might be what was meant by the love analogy. If so, I think you've responded successfully.


On re-reading his post, I think I may have missed the point as well.  Was it perhaps trying to drive at the distinction between our observable world as material, and the abstract concept of love as immaterial and so beyond science? If so, that's easily refuted, but I'll wait until things are clarified.


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## science

Polednice said:


> On re-reading his post, I think I may have missed the point as well.  Was it perhaps trying to drive at the distinction between our observable world as material, and the abstract concept of love as immaterial and so beyond science? If so, that's easily refuted, but I'll wait until things are clarified.


I think that might have been it. Funny I didn't even think of it. He seems sophisticated enough not to try a "nice feelings prove God's existence" argument.

I think it'd be wise, for rhetorical purposes at least, to substitute "observable" for "material." In the first place, I have some reservation about describing things like "gravity" as "material," although I realize it's common; but in the second, it might make the "nice feelings prove God's existence" argument a little simpler.

Third, what if we did observe, say, a ghost? Took it into a lab, did experiments; it had no mass, seemed to be able to occupy the same space as a physical object, was able to manipulate the world in apparent violation of the laws of physics - what would be going on there? I'd say it's science, but arguably a science of the immaterial world. We would perhaps be able to find things out about ghosts: they last so long before disappearing, they like to be offered food and drink even though they can't ingest it, they communicate through human languages, and so on. If ghosts or angels or gods or spirits of any sort could be observed, we would study them scientifically like that. So I think it's not true that science can only study the material world: it's true, of course, instead, to say that science has only observed the material world. It wasn't obviously going to happen that way 500 years ago.

The coming decades, I expect, will see brain science be the new cultural battleground, as the last remnants of "soul" are exorcised from informed discussion of the mind. People are not going to like that. And then I think the material/observable difference will be really useful.


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## Ukko

science said:


> [...]
> The coming decades, I expect, will see brain science be the new cultural battleground, as the last remnants of "soul" are exorcised from informed discussion of the mind. People are not going to like that. And then I think the material/observable difference will be really useful.


*"Informed"* discussion? _There's_ a loaded term. _Chris_ and I probably have very different understandings of the soul, but betcha they work as well as yours.


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## science

Hilltroll72 said:


> *"Informed"* discussion? _There's_ a loaded term. _Chris_ and I probably have very different understandings of the soul, but betcha they work as well as yours.


Work, how?


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## Ukko

science said:


> Work, how?


Sorry, don't have my dictionary at hand.

Happy Thanksgiving.


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## science

To you too!

I'd guess you don't need a dictionary, you just need to tell me what you mean by your understandings of the soul "working" as well as mine. 

Explaining the world?


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## Ukko

science said:


> To you too!
> 
> I'd guess you don't need a dictionary, you just need to tell me what you mean by your understandings of the soul "working" as well as mine.
> 
> Explaining the world?


I mean that the internal logic will work as well. I have no explanation for the world.


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## Elgarian

Polednice said:


> The fact is that, though it is useful to recognise the limits of science (which is an entirely appropriate thing to do in a thread about critical thinking), it still must be made clear that it is the _best_ system we have, far better than any other, despite whatever imperfections we might perceive.


We've been here before Poley, and I don't want to go over the same ground again, but I would like to make the following points before wandering off to other pastures:

*1. Clarity and jargon*
Whether we like it or not, discussing the ways in which we learn about the world and our relation to it is a philosophical issue; and we have 2,500 years of recorded thought by some amazingly clever people to help us contemplate the problem. To ignore all that seems to me to be folly. We don't need to keep reinventing the wheel. In any discussion of this sort I always try to avoid the use of jargon (my intention is to be as clear as possible, and most certainly not vague or obscure), but surely no one supposes that resolving these profound questions is going to be _easy?_ I can't (and no one could) summarise the results of a lifetime's thought, reading, and research, into a short and snappy post in simple words, however much I wish I could. There isn't a shortcut. We all have to do the slog for ourselves, and I tried to explain, as clearly as I could, the path I chose to tread, and where it's led me.

*2. What science is good at*
If we want a pragmatic result, then science is THE best way to get one. If you want to be able to predict outcomes to the highest possible accuracy, then the scientific method is THE best way to achieve that. That is precisely what the scientific method is designed to achieve.

*3. Issues of 'truth'*
It seems to me that the problems arise when we start asking questions about 'truth'. If (like friend Science) you think that accurate prediction of outcomes is all the 'truth' there is, then that's probably where the source of our disagreement lies. I'm driven to say again what I said at the outset: I think every one of our mental models of the universe is 'wrong' - in the sense that the 'underlying reality' is _nothing like_ our mental models of it, scientific or otherwise (except only in the similarities of the prediction of outcomes). One can see this even at the most superficial level: the model universe of Newtonian physics (perhaps the most successful theory in the history of science, in terms of longevity) is _fundamentally different _from the model universe of Einsteinian physics, yet both predict outcomes in the 'real' world extraordinarily well, within their limits. That must, surely, trigger alarm bells about what we think these theories mean, and what their relation is to the 'real' world.

But again as I said at the outset, this need not concern anyone who just wants to get on with their life, and eat cottage pie, or go to the moon.


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## Polednice

Just a couple of quick responses, Elgarian:

1) I'm sorry if you thought that I was singling you out in my brief mention of jargon (Science was more elaborate on that point). If I had meant that remark to be about you, I would have used your name. In fact, I think you are remarkably clear on these issues most of the time, and if I don't understand, it's usually not your fault. I was making oblique reference to some other posters.

3) I totally understand your points about 'truth', and I believe I have avoided the use of the word in order to avoid those difficulties. Of course, as well as understanding, I also agree entirely. But there remains the issue as I mentioned above that we have to be careful, because some people take discussions like these as an opportunity to squeeze religion into a non-religion sized hole.


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## Meaghan

Polednice said:


> I think this is akin to Keats' old lament: "Do not all charms fly / at the mere touch of cold philosophy?" famously in reference to a rainbow. *No, Keats, they don't.* I'm in love, and I'm fully aware of the 'illusion' of love as a biological necessity for our species. Does that detract from the sensation of love? No. Does it mean that I should be sceptical of my feelings, and work against my instincts? No. It just makes the illusion _even more amazing_ - the fact that it is an illusion at all is a wondrous feat of nature! Why would I want to think that it's some magical property of an unseen world? Consciousness is mysterious, unpredictable, and far, far, far from being explained, but that doesn't mean we have to postulate supernatural agents.


Like like like.  I haven't read all the recent posts on this thread, but I like this bit. This is how I feel, not only about science, but about music theory. For me, understanding the mechanisms behind the miracle a bit better only makes it seem more miraculous.


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## Kopachris

Polednice said:


> Just a couple of quick responses, Elgarian:
> 
> 1) I'm sorry if you thought that I was singling you out in my brief mention of jargon (Science was more elaborate on that point). If I had meant that remark to be about you, I would have used your name. In fact, I think you are remarkably clear on these issues most of the time, and if I don't understand, it's usually not your fault. I was making oblique reference to some other posters.
> 
> 3) I totally understand your points about 'truth', and I believe I have avoided the use of the word in order to avoid those difficulties. Of course, as well as understanding, I also agree entirely. But there remains the issue as I mentioned above that we have to be careful, because some people take discussions like these as an opportunity to squeeze religion into a non-religion sized hole.


The size of the hole is ambiguous. What fits into the hole will vary by the individual. Religion fits for some people. It doesn't fit for others. There's nothing wrong with that, and there's nothing inherently wrong with religion.

Now back to our scheduled programming...


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## Polednice

Kopachris said:


> The size of the hole is ambiguous. What fits into the hole will vary by the individual. Religion fits for some people. It doesn't fit for others. There's nothing wrong with that, and there's nothing inherently wrong with religion.


We obviously disagree on that, I just find it very annoying that philosophical conversations present sneaky opportunities for religious folks to see people admit a flaw in science and then shout "Religion! Religion! Religion!" We are right to acknowledge the limits of science, but, if we happen to think that it is still the best thing we have for understanding all questions we might want to ask, then I think we need to make that clear.

If someone wants to shove a round peg into a square hole, I don't care - I just don't want them to think they're clever for doing so.


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## Ukko

Science answers all the questions you want to ask? That is illuminating, _Poley_. There's a fairly good chance I will stop annoying you.


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## Kopachris

Polednice said:


> We obviously disagree on that, I just find it very annoying that philosophical conversations present sneaky opportunities for religious folks to see people admit a flaw in science and then shout "Religion! Religion! Religion!" We are right to acknowledge the limits of science, but, if we happen to think that it is still the best thing we have for understanding all questions we might want to ask, then I think we need to make that clear.
> 
> If someone wants to shove a round peg into a square hole, I don't care - I just don't want them to think they're clever for doing so.


I agree that it's very annoying for people to try to shove religion where it doesn't belong. My point was that the hole that science leaves is something that each individual needs to fill. *That hole can be filled with religion, but it doesn't have to be.* That hole gives questions that science most certainly _cannot_ answer sufficiently: "what is right?" "What should we strive for?" "What's the point of living?" (Questions that have no right or wrong answer, and so are immune to science's technique of experimentation and observation.) Nietzsche filled that hole with the _Übermensch_, and later, eternal recurrence. Some people can fill that hole on their own. Others need the idea of some great omni-benevolent being. I use a messy amalgam of all of these to fill that hole (like using pitch to seal a crack in the hull of a ship).

And now I shall cease my rambling before it becomes too redundant and pointless.


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## science

I'm not sure I've followed the conversation correctly, but it seems like we're talking about "the God of the gaps" now.

There will probably always be some gaps for that God to live in, but they've gotten so much smaller over the past few centuries, and the shrinking has been accelerating.

But it would be equally fair to fill the gaps with _almost any_ arbitrary hypothesis.


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## Kopachris

science said:


> I'm not sure I've followed the conversation correctly, but it seems like we're talking about "the God of the gaps" now.
> 
> There will probably always be some gaps for that God to live in, but they've gotten so much smaller over the past few centuries, and the shrinking has been accelerating.
> 
> *But it would be equally fair to fill the gaps with almost any arbitrary hypothesis.*


Exactly my point. It doesn't matter what the gaps are filled with. Just don't try to fill someone else's gaps unless they ask you to!


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## Vaneyes

Yes, I have confidence in my briefs.


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## Kopachris

I'd like to make a clarification: when I said "religion" in my last few posts, I actually meant "theism," which most people don't actually distinguish from religion. I usually do distinguish them, with "religion" implying that something is done or an idea is held "religiously," that is, that the thing is done or the idea is held without regard to circumstance. Doing something religiously like that is just foolish--there's no arguing otherwise. Therefore, a proper definition of "religious" as an adjective describing a person could be synonymous with "stubborn." But I digress.


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## science

I also have an idiosyncratic definition of religion: any interaction with supernatural persons. 

religion: interaction with supernatural persons 
magic: interaction with impersonal supernatural forces
science/technology: interaction with impersonal natural forces
ethics: interaction with natural persons 

The categories are not at all mutually exclusive of course; sometimes it's not clear whether a thing is supposed to be natural or supernatural, and sometimes it's not clear whether a thing is personal or impersonal. And of course the categories make use of each other. 

I'd hypothesize, however, that every individual implicitly distinguishes between "natural" and "supernatural." I know this is not a universally recognized idea, but I'd bet it's right. 

In casual speech, though, I often use "religion" similarly to Kopachris' definition. For instance, it's really interesting to see how modern states incorporate so much technology that was originally developed by religions: imposing temples, solemn rituals, hymns, myths, saints, childhood education (loyalty training, essentially) and so on. In the militaries of modern states, these technologies are only used more intensively. As states have figured out how to use these essentially "religious" technologies, they've become able to command the citizens' loyalties so reliably that they no longer need religion, allowing religious tolerance to appear. Of course many modern states also have something religion almost never used successfully: legitimization by the appearance of democracy. I'd even argue that modern states, cynically unburdened from many of the self-restraints religions impose on themselves, have learned (and are learning) to use these technologies even more effectively than the religions did.


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## science

I should make clear that the reason that is idiosyncratic is that many people in common speech distinguish between "religion" and "magic" differently. For instance, I would define a seance as a religious ritual, while I think people would usually define it as magic, because it doesn't carry the social prestige that we usually attribute to religion. 

That social prestige was acquired back in the days of state religions, and still hangs on vestigially, but I don't think there are good intellectual reasons for it, and the further we get from state religion, the less sense it makes. Really new religions, like Raelianism or Wicca, hardly benefit from it at all, for instance. Confucianism has almost completely lost its prestige; of the major state religious traditions, Islam, Christianity and Buddhism seem to be holding on to their official prestige the most effectively.


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## Igneous01

I found more to add to this topic. Returning to the original question of the OP, here some more to think about:

Infinite Regression
and
Regress Argument (asking, why? to infinity)

Suppose you have a belief, say for example, you believe in General Relativity.
Someone comes along and asks you "Why do you believe in it?"
you believe it to be true because it has been backed up and proven by many successful experiments and attempts to break it, which strengthen its validity as being true.
Then they ask "Why is it valid as being true?"
You then say because you can predict and calculate the motion of stars accurately with it.
Then they ask "How is it possible to calculate the motions?"
You then explain the equation (which I forgot) and explain gravity, and the major components of the theory.
Then they ask "Why does gravity exist?"
Then you say its because of the cosmic foam or space time.
Then they ask "Why does space-time/cosmic foam exist?".
Maybe you'll say its because of string theory or big bang.
Then they ask "Why did it happen/Why do strings exist"
Lets for sake of argument, you say God created it.
Then they ask "Who created God? Why does God exist?"
ad infinitum

and this is where you cannot answer anymore, because you yourself are not so sure anymore. This can go on indefinitely really. So, does General Relativity mean the absolute truth? If you can regress infinitum about a belief or theory, then it cannot be absolutely true, because the validity of the argument supporting the validity of the argument.....etc...etc....of the argument, cannot be proven to end. Thus, truth is infinite - it cannot be absolute.

However, there are some refutes to the regression theory, which also bring about very good points. Just something to think about when you find yourself questioning your beliefs or searching for absolute truth.


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## Elgarian

Polednice said:


> I'm sorry if you thought that I was singling you out in my brief mention of jargon.


No I didn't, actually - I was really just quoting your comment as a useful springboard to respond to several points that had been raised by others, and which were of general concern.



> But there remains the issue as I mentioned above that we have to be careful, because some people take discussions like these as an opportunity to squeeze religion into a non-religion sized hole.


That's never been an issue in any of my thinking. The 'God of the gaps' is based on a fundamental philosophical misunderstanding, doomed to be a kind of 'fix-it' supernatural glue that gets ever smaller and smaller as we develop more and more successful scientific theories. It's not a concept worth defending: it arises from linguistic problems revolving around the word 'God', and from the muddle that arises from category errors (as I mentioned in my first post), and is the reason why these discussions go round in circles, or stall in confused desperation between two impossibly polarised camps. That's why some understanding of philosophy is so essential; it's necessary to be able to unpick the words used by each side, examine them, and locate the source of the errors that create the log jam. Philosophy won't answer the question 'Is there a God?' (I'm not convinced that the question has any meaning, actually)*, but it _can_ help us to recognise the fallacious nature of almost all the discussions that occur about the topic.

*By this, I mean that I doubt whether language is capable of framing the question in such a way as to make it answerable. That is, when we frame the question, we're trying to move into territory identified by Wittgenstein as being beyond 'things that can be said'. Yet still we try to talk about them. You can see, from this paradox, why the philosopher David Hume suggested that when we reach this point, it's necessary to recognise that our 'knowledge' isn't really knowledge at all, but expectation; to accept with due diffidence the fallibility of our opinions; ... and then to go and have our dinner, not because we've reasoned it out, but because we're hungry. Human beings are very good at fooling themselves into thinking they do things for rational reasons.


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## Polednice

Kopachris said:


> My point was that the hole that science leaves is something that each individual needs to fill. *That hole can be filled with religion, but it doesn't have to be.* That hole gives questions that science most certainly _cannot_ answer sufficiently: "what is right?" "What should we strive for?" "What's the point of living?" (Questions that have no right or wrong answer, and so are immune to science's technique of experimentation and observation.) Nietzsche filled that hole with the _Übermensch_, and later, eternal recurrence. Some people can fill that hole on their own. Others need the idea of some great omni-benevolent being. I use a messy amalgam of all of these to fill that hole (like using pitch to seal a crack in the hull of a ship).
> 
> And now I shall cease my rambling before it becomes too redundant and pointless.


I shall try to be brief, because the points you raise could be talked about for hours:

1) I'm not convinced that any holes left by science are holes that people _need_ to fill. We certainly have the impulse to fill them, but I think that impulse can lead us in bad directions.
2) Some of those questions (such as "What's the point of living?") can be convincingly argued as nonsense questions, requiring neither a scientific nor supernatural answer.
3) Again, on the subject of personal 'need', some people might need to answer the above question with the idea of a deity. _However_, when people do so, not only are they attempting to answer non-scientific questions, they simultaneously provide their own answers for questions that science _can_ answer such as the origin of the universe, life, and consciousness.

My main point wasn't really to get into these issues though. I just wanted the discussion on the philosophy of science to recognise some purpose to it. In what way can recognising 'truth' as a vulnerable idea actually help us in our understanding of the world, or in how we shape our opinions? As Elgarian said at one point (I think), he wasn't "science bashing", but many people selectively take these discussions as exactly that.


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## Kopachris

Fine. I disagree with you, at least partially, on all three points, but I doubt we'll come to an agreement unless we shift the topic into another direction.


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## Elgarian

Polednice said:


> In what way can recognising 'truth' as a vulnerable idea actually help us in our understanding of the world, or in how we shape our opinions?


That's a nice new framing of the question.



> As Elgarian said at one point (I think), he wasn't "science bashing", but many people selectively take these discussions as exactly that.


Thanks for highlighting this. My concern indeed is not in any sense to 'bash' science (how foolish _that_ would be, to 'bash' the most successful information-gathering tool that mankind has ever devised), but to examine the character of the meanings that we can extract from its findings. The Scientific Method is a procedure that can be defended philosophically, and understood in eminently practical terms (as I've been trying to outline), where 'knowledge' is clearly defined as being related to the effectiveness of theories at predicting measurable outcomes. But even here, we need to bear in mind the consequences of Hume's warning, that the whole idea of the relation between cause and effect, which lies at the heart of the scientific method, is not something we _know_; but only something we've come to expect.

As I said before, once we try to proceed beyond the merely practical questions that science asks (and attempts to answer in its specially defined way), a great abyss of unknowing lies before us. Any world view, any mode of thought that doesn't acknowledge the significance of that realisation, can't help but be inadequate.


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## Dster

'Science does not deny the existence of God. Science explains the physical phenomenona' - Stephen Hawking


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## Dodecaplex

Dster said:


> 'Science does not deny the existence of God. Science explains the physical phenomenona' - Stephen Hawking


Source?

....


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## Polednice

The source of that quotation doesn't really matter. On the face of it, it's a cute quote from a scientist in favour of religion, but all it really says is that science can't disprove the existence of a god, and no one has ever suggested that it can.


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## Dodecaplex

Polednice said:


> The source of that quotation doesn't really matter. On the face of it, it's a cute quote from a scientist in favour of religion, but all it really says is that science can't disprove the existence of a god, and no one has ever suggested that it can.


The funny part is that Hawking has actually said a few things that are quite the opposite of what that quote says. So I doubt it's actually by Hawking himself, which is why I asked for the source.


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## Ukko

In the last thing of Hawking's I read, he stated that he had become convinced that God does not exist. This was because of accumulated 'negative evidence' (meaning he figured he had looked everywhere and couldn't find Him). As per SOP, that doesn't constitute scientific proof of His non-existence.


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## Dster

He said it in a National Geographic programme (in his computer generated voice) about the universe I watched the other day. He then proceed to show the audience that creation of the universe does not require 'God'


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## Dodecaplex

Dster said:


> He said it in a National Geographic programme (in his computer generated voice) about the universe I watched the other day. He then proceed to show the audience that creation of the universe does not require 'God'


You still took the quote out of context, and as a result, distorted Hawking's views.


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## science

We should be clear that the God that Hawking is looking for through physics and apparently not finding is the cosmic creator, not the personal friend of believers. Looking for the latter would be a different operation.


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## Elgarian

Suggestion:

This thread of Poley's was NOT intended to start a science versus God debate. It's a deeply interesting discussion about what we know, what we don't know, and the nature of knowledge. Let's not ruin it. There are enough pointless (and utterly fallacious) science v God debates already - let's not make another one.


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## Polednice

Thanks for the renewal of purpose, Elgarian. 

There are a lot of ways we could take this thread, and so far we have been largely dedicated to discussing scientific inquiry - assessing what scientific models actually represent and what kind of knowledge this gives us.

But moving away from the limits of methodical curiosity, how about the stability of our political beliefs? Someone else mentioned it briefly earlier, and I mentioned my own thoughts as likely being biased by my upbringing (as is no doubt the case for most of us), but the point wasn't really taken up in discussion.

The interesting (and often extremely frustrating) thing for me is that so much of what politics is about - creating and implementing policies to better the nation - is (or should be) quantifiable. We can measure the success of our economy; we can measure our crime and incarceration rates; and though any measure of 'happiness' is a bit dubious, we can measure various kinds of equality.

So why are approaches to all these things based on (usually ideological) opinion when it seems that facts could do a better job? I don't know anywhere near enough about our economy to know what's best for it, or even to be able to assess how good our incumbent politicians' plans are, but I do know that we have well-educated economists and historical precedents for recession that are apparently completely ignored. Why? So that right-wing groups can implement traditionally right-wing policies, and left-wing groups can implement traditionally left-wing policies.

On social issues of equality and health-care, the 'facts' become hazier and probably less useful because our beliefs can become informed by other beliefs (such as wanting equality except in cases where a personal religion forbids the rights of certain minority groups). Personally, I take what I suppose is a fairly utilitarian approach - happiness for the greatest number, so long as it doesn't harm anyone else. Everyone should have legislation to allow them to marry whoever and wherever, or to control their reproduction _etc._, and those who disagree should simply not do those things. Legislation of one group's morality tyrannises any opposing morality - something entirely undemocratic which only happens because certain groups are legitimised by association with a god.

But maybe I am unwise and shouldn't be too confident in a live and let live attitude...

_P.S. Please try not to get sidetracked by (or take too personally) any specific mentions of policy or morality. This is a difficult abstract topic which is hard to discuss without concrete examples, but those are not the focus of the discussion. It's not about *what* we believe, but how *confident* we can be that what we believe is right and/or good._


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## Chi_townPhilly

_This_ takes the thread in a new and interesting direction-


Polednice said:


> The interesting (and often extremely frustrating) thing for me is that so much of what politics is about - creating and implementing policies to better the nation - is (or should be) quantifiable. We can measure the success of our economy; we can measure our crime and incarceration rates; and though any measure of 'happiness' is a bit dubious, we can measure various kinds of equality.


Sort of brings to mind a lyric from Donald Fagen's 'IGY,'


> Just machines to make big decisions-
> Programmed by fellas with compassion and vision...


But (joking aside) here is where I believe that the USA would be well-served by a relatively decentralized viewpoint grounded in the 10th Amendment (powers not specifically delineated constitutionally are reserved for the States), if the courage could be found to apply it in a more widespread manner.

Let left-wing states govern in their left-wing manner. Let right-wing states govern in their right-wing manner. Let moderates seek out the ground between the two and, well- the proof of the pudding would be in the eating, no? The less-successful states would have people 'vote-with-their-feet' (more), and the most effective governance would be allowed to emerge.


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## Ukko

Chi_townPhilly said:


> [...]
> But (joking aside) here is where I believe that the USA would be well-served by a relatively decentralized viewpoint grounded in the 10th Amendment (powers not specifically delineated constitutionally are reserved for the States), if the courage could be found to apply it in a more widespread manner.
> 
> Let left-wing states govern in their left-wing manner. Let right-wing states govern in their right-wing manner. Let moderates seek out the ground between the two and, well- the proof of the pudding would be in the eating, no? The less-successful states would have people 'vote-with-their-feet' (more), and the most effective governance would be allowed to emerge.


Reads like a plan. Getting Congress to go along could be problematical, and getting either 'wing' to agree probably even more so.

But if you start a States' Rights Party, let me know.


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## Aramis

It's hard to be confident about anything, I may even be reincarnation of Chopin, who can deny that for sure, nothing is sure LISZT WHERE ARE YOU IF YOU'RE READING THIS CONTACT ME LET'S HANG OUT LIKE IN GOOD OLD TIMES (I LOST MY FORM WITH PIANO BTW)


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## science

Of course the reason for unifying the country under the federal government was to allow us to implement more successful industrial strategy; if we broke it up that would be compromised. I also doubt that a state-based social security program could be implemented. And I suspect that there are still states that would not enforce civil rights for black people. 

But it would be nice to force a lot of the mooching states to fend for themselves. It would probably be a good idea to have 50 different currencies so that we wouldn't have an EU-like situation forcing small states into financial troubles. 

And, in a few decades, we'd be able to cede Texas to Mexico.


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## Ukko

Jeez, we're only talking 10th Amendment here, not dissolution.


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## Kopachris

Polednice said:


> [...]
> 
> The interesting (and often extremely frustrating) thing for me is that so much of what politics is about - creating and implementing policies to better the nation - is (or should be) quantifiable. We can measure the success of our economy; we can measure our crime and incarceration rates; and though any measure of 'happiness' is a bit dubious, we can measure various kinds of equality.
> 
> So why are approaches to all these things based on (usually ideological) opinion when it seems that facts could do a better job? I don't know anywhere near enough about our economy to know what's best for it, or even to be able to assess how good our incumbent politicians' plans are, but I do know that we have well-educated economists and historical precedents for recession that are apparently completely ignored. Why? So that right-wing groups can implement traditionally right-wing policies, and left-wing groups can implement traditionally left-wing policies.
> 
> [...]


You're not the only one who doesn't know anywhere near enough about the economy to know what's best for it. We have several models (borrowing the term from earlier discussion) to describe how the economy works, but none of them are very accurate. Economists saw the bubble growing larger, knew that it would pop, and saw the looming recession because it's happened before, but they all had different ideas about how to fix it. Some things, such as that, might be prevented with better policy in other areas (business law), but economic policy is largely hit-and-miss. We're never sure how a specific policy will affect the economy, or even if it will affect the economy. Often, something will affect the economy one way when it's implemented, and then will affect the economy differently when it's implemented again later. There's a saying: "If you take all the economists in the world and line them end to end, they will point in every direction."

I agree that the left-wing/right-wing system is outdated, though. What strategy is implemented for what problem should be decided on a case-by-case basis; they shouldn't implement a certain policy simply because that's what the ruling party wants.



> But maybe I am unwise and shouldn't be too confident in a live and let live attitude...


Nah. Displaying a lack of confidence is often more destructive (especially in debate, school, and politics) than a little overconfidence.


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## science

Kidding aside, Polednice's question basically asked about empirical approaches to politics. I think there's a lot of merit to that. I think the majority of my political beliefs at this point are determined by economics.

But I understand that people have moral concerns as well, which might even transcend economics. It's not a left/right issue: both sides are willing to sacrifice some economic gain for certain symbolic or moral issues.

There is a fascinating body of knowledge emerging on the psychology of politics. The original mystery, I think, was something like: what does abortion have to do with gun rights, flag burning, welfare, imperialistic military policy, drug legalization, censorship, capital punishment, or global warming? Why, if we know a person's stance on any single one of those issues, are we able to predict with something like 85% accuracy the person's stances on the rest of the issues? Logically, they don't seem related. So, predictably, it turns out they are psychologically. It seems to be turning out that "conservative" and "liberal" are personality types that express themselves in varying philosophies.

If so, then our philosophical justifications for our beliefs seem rather ad hoc. This is a good example of the kind of really radical skepticism that contemporary psychology can introduce.

I try to take conservative views seriously, but I might be simply unable to do so: values like loyalty, tradition and cultural solidarity will never mean as much to me as to a conservative; values like justice, diversity and curiosity will never mean as much to the conservative as to me.

It may be that it's good for any society to have plenty of both personality types: conservatives to make sure we remain a coherent community capable of self-defense and advantageous aggression; liberals to try new ways of doing things and to make peaceful relationships with other communities.

That's a nice way of looking at things, but it means that the tension will always be there; there will is no possibility of reaching a meeting of the minds. One side will always be more eager to preserve the solidarity and traditions of our society; the other side will always be more eager to try new things and to work with outsiders. And that the best that we can hope for is vibrant, _contentious_ politics.


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## science

Hilltroll72 said:


> Jeez, we're only talking 10th Amendment here, not dissolution.


When one state legalizes marijuana and another establishes stronger laws against it - border patrol?


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## Chi_townPhilly

science said:


> When one state legalizes marijuana and another establishes stronger laws against it - border patrol?


Got that already with Fireworks... and yet the Union endures... rolleyes


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## science

Yeah, fireworks. Drugs. Roughly equivalent social problems there. My bad.


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## Ukko

science said:


> Yeah, fireworks. Drugs. Roughly equivalent social problems there. My bad.


Yeah, yeah. The 10th Amendment does not have a cut-off date. It applies (at least in theory) to the Constitution as it is today. I realize you have no wish to pursue that thought, but it is what it is.


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## Polednice

Thank you science for again articulating my thoughts far better than I did myself!


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## science

My pleasure! I didn't realize I was doing so!


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## science

@ Troll

On the contrary, feel free to delve into Constitutional law. I may not be able to follow, but I'd like to see the discussion.


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## Polednice

With the help of your post, I know now what I really wanted to say about the confidence we have in our political beliefs.

As you described, if you take one of many contentious issues and ask a person's stance on it, you can have an 85% chance of guessing their stance on other issues. For me, this is completely true. I am a typical lefty liberal. Guns are bad, flag burning is fine, welfare is necessary to an extent, military policy is aggressive, drugs should be legalised, censorship is dangerous, capital punishment is barbaric, global warming is an immediate threat.

To me, I naturally feel like I have the right and good perspective on all of these issues. But simply knowing that all of my beliefs are aligned with a political ideology that could be guessed at gives me cause to be doubtful of what I think.

Certain things - like some kinds of freedom of speech and censorship - are more about our principles than any measurable effects (though changes in policy would certainly cause changes that we could measure). But the effects of guns, abortion, welfare, drugs _etc._ on life and crime can all be measured, so we all need to be wary of towing the party line instead of checking the hard facts, which perhaps I haven't done enough of myself.

One of the major problems here is that both ends of the political spectrum use statistics to give their arguments legitimacy. It ought to be impossible for this to happen - the numbers ought to only be able to support one side of an argument - but they are bent and twisted and refracted, and they end up negating each other. So where am I supposed to turn if I want to make my mind up on whether or not some of these complex social forces are good or bad for us?

(Some people obviously derive their beliefs from a higher being, but that option isn't available to me)


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## science

Polednice said:


> With the help of your post, I know now what I really wanted to say about the confidence we have in our political beliefs.
> 
> As you described, if you take one of many contentious issues and ask a person's stance on it, you can have an 85% chance of guessing their stance on other issues. For me, this is completely true. I am a typical lefty liberal. Guns are bad, flag burning is fine, welfare is necessary to an extent, military policy is aggressive, drugs should be legalised, censorship is dangerous, capital punishment is barbaric, global warming is an immediate threat.
> 
> To me, I naturally feel like I have the right and good perspective on all of these issues. But simply knowing that all of my beliefs are aligned with a political ideology that could be guessed at gives me cause to be doubtful of what I think.
> 
> Certain things - like some kinds of freedom of speech and censorship - are more about our principles than any measurable effects (though changes in policy would certainly cause changes that we could measure). But the effects of guns, abortion, welfare, drugs _etc._ on life and crime can all be measured, so we all need to be wary of towing the party line instead of checking the hard facts, which perhaps I haven't done enough of myself.
> 
> One of the major problems here is that both ends of the political spectrum use statistics to give their arguments legitimacy. It ought to be impossible for this to happen - the numbers ought to only be able to support one side of an argument - but they are bent and twisted and refracted, and they end up negating each other. So where am I supposed to turn if I want to make my mind up on whether or not some of these complex social forces are good or bad for us?
> 
> (Some people obviously derive their beliefs from a higher being, but that option is available to me)


I think we'll have to live with a high degree of uncertainty. Human societies are so complex that hardly any model of them is going to be very reliable; predictions will always be iffy.

So Burke's line of thought - not to make changes too quickly, for fear of unpredictable unintended consequences - really has a great deal of validity, in my opinion.


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## amfortas

science said:


> So Burke's line of thought - not to make changes too quickly, for fear of unpredictable unintended consequences - really has a great deal of validity, in my opinion.


Burke's thought may have validity, but unfortunately versions of his argument have too often been used to stonewall progress on basic human rights issues. It is no doubt true, for instance, that abolishing slavery had unpredictable unintended consequences. But it's hard to see how this would have justified prolonging the institution even further.


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## Polednice

Has anyone read or seen anything about Sam Harris' take on science being a useful source for morality? I'm conscious of some of my points sounding a bit like that, but, though I haven't read his stuff, I have heard many bad things about it.


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## science

amfortas said:


> Burke's thought may have validity, but unfortunately versions of his argument have too often been used to stonewall progress on basic human rights issues. It is no doubt true, for instance, that abolishing slavery had unpredictable unintended consequences. But it's hard to see how this would have justified prolonging the institution even further.


That's true.


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## Elgarian

Polednice said:


> So why are approaches to all these things based on (usually ideological) opinion when it seems that facts could do a better job?


The chief problem is in deciding what is a suitable measure for fact-gathering that all can agree upon, because those decisions have to start with the assumption of a value system. But let's suppose we do so decide, somehow or other. Then, having gathered the facts, we need to interpret their significance; and again, the interpretations depend on the assumption of a value system. This thrashing to and fro between alternate ideologies, (based very often on the same set of ill-chosen facts) we can observe being exercised daily in the political world. So the problem doesn't lie with the facts, _as facts_, but with the value systems that drive the decisions about what facts are relevant in the first place, and the value systems that subsequently guide the interpretation of them. That raises the eternal philosophical question about what is 'The Good', and ... I shudder at the thought of getting drawn down that road, so I'll stop here!


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## science

Polednice said:


> Has anyone read or seen anything about Sam Harris' take on science being a useful source for morality? I'm conscious of some of my points sounding a bit like that, but, though I haven't read his stuff, I have heard many bad things about it.


I haven't read the book, but I've seen a debate online between him and ... some Christian guy... Lukecash mentioned him... [Edit: and the subject was Harris' argument that science can ground morality; I think the Christian guy won the debate hands-down]

I'd guess most of Harris' points are good ones: there's a lot that science can do to help inform our moral choices.

But ultimately, I disagree with his dismissal of the fact-value distinction. He keeps saying things like, "If anything is wrong, that is wrong." Fine, but the thing is: Can he demonstrate that it is a fact that anything is wrong? I don't think he can. He just keeps slipping values in. Science does not (I think it cannot) tell us that _anything_ is wrong. It can show that a huge amount of suffering is occurring; it can't show that the suffering is immoral. It takes a value-based judgment to reach that conclusion.

I can imagine an approach analogous to mathematics, where we assume some moral axioms and reason based on them. But I don't see how we can establish any of those axioms as facts.


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## science

I'm not sure that I understood Elgarian, but we might have said essentially the same thing.


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## Chi_townPhilly

Hilltroll72 said:


> Yeah, yeah. The 10th Amendment does not have a cut-off date. It applies (at least in theory) to the Constitution as it is today. I realize you have no wish to pursue that thought, but it is what it is.
> 
> 
> science said:
> 
> 
> 
> On the contrary, feel free to delve into Constitutional law. I may not be able to follow, but I'd like to see the discussion..
Click to expand...

All right- I suppose we could entertain a digression apropos US Constitutional Law, but that might be an issue better left for another thread- or better yet, a Social Group. Nonetheless, I typically advocate the following concerning the US Constitution:

1) _Read_ the text.
2) *Apply* the text....

... and return the "emanations issuing from penumbras" to the chiaroscuro world from whence they came...


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## Elgarian

science said:


> Science does not (I think it cannot) tell us that _anything_ is wrong. It can show that a huge amount of suffering is occurring; it can't show that the suffering is immoral. It takes a value-based judgment to reach that conclusion.


Spot on! I applaud this wholeheartedly. And yes, we did say the same thing but you said it in a lot less space. We have to bring moral values _to_ science; we can't (and _mustn't_) try to deduce them _from_ it.


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## Polednice

science said:


> I'm not sure that I understood Elgarian, but we might have said essentially the same thing.


I think so!

Given the above, it looks like we're brought back round to philosophy. If we exclude the possibility that we can determine what is Good from a higher being who we can actually communicate with (though I know not everyone will exclude that), then how can we be _confident_ in our feelings on what is Good? I'm not at all familiar with philosophical thought in this area, but is utilitarianism too simple?

I like this discussion - I feel like I'm actually learning something for a change!


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## science

Polednice said:


> I think so!
> 
> Given the above, it looks like we're brought back round to philosophy. If we exclude the possibility that we can determine what is Good from a higher being who we can actually communicate with (though I know not everyone will exclude that), then how can we be _confident_ in our feelings on what is Good? I'm not at all familiar with philosophical thought in this area, but is utilitarianism too simple?
> 
> I like this discussion - I feel like I'm actually learning something for a change!


I think the issue is once again democracy vs. authority.

Authoritarian value systems want a God (or something) above us to tell us what is right and wrong; our own values are insignificant. I might not like being a peasant (and serving up most of the food we grow and the attractive women in my family to the nobleman and his sons), but God's ways are higher than man's, so that's that. The law is legitimated by God's command. [Edit: And of course the religious professionals, who know God's commands, work for the political authorities.]

Democratic value systems are up to the people, up to us. We decide that we want to outlaw something: we get together and outlaw it. Matters not what any deity tells us; the law is legitimated by our free choice.

As so often in life, there is no way to be sure that we're choosing correctly (or that there is an objective "correct" to choose); hopefully we'll think hard and introspect carefully and hopefully that'll help us go wrong less often, but surely we'll regret a lot of our choices. The thing is, I suspect all the authoritarian systems have done even worse.


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## amfortas

Polednice said:


> Given the above, it looks like we're brought back round to philosophy. If we exclude the possibility that we can determine what is Good from a higher being who we can actually communicate with (though I know not everyone will exclude that), then how can we be _confident_ in our feelings on what is Good? I'm not at all familiar with philosophical thought in this area, but is utilitarianism too simple?


I was always drawn to utilitarianism, but I think it presents problems similar to what has been said just now about science. "The greatest good for the greatest number" sounds eminently reasonable, but only if you already hold some unspoken value presuppositions. If I, for example, hold that my own pleasure is the ultimate good, no purely logical argument will persuade me of the utilitarian view.


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## science

amfortas said:


> I was always drawn to utilitarianism, but I think it presents problems similar to what has been said just now about science. "The greatest good for the greatest number" sounds eminently reasonable, but only if you already hold some unspoken value presuppositions. If I, for example, hold that my own pleasure is the ultimate good, no purely logical argument will persuade me of the utilitarian view.


I haven't put much thought into utilitarianism in the abstract for a very long time, but I recall being most concerned about the rights of individuals in a utilitarian system. If we can bring about a great deal of human happiness at the cost of torturing a few dozen innocent people....

IMO, our moral intuitions can't be systematized, because ultimately they are illogical. But utilitarianism has a firm grasp on some of our most basic intuitions, and probably works most of the time.

[Edit: I'd like to tie my last couple of posts together by observing that utilitarianism was essentiality justification for using progressive taxation to pay for services that primarily benefited the poor: public education, sewage, and so on. That's a good example of a democratically legitimated law that violated previous aristocratic laws. And now, one of the basic tensions in our politics, as we return to an aristocratic social structure, is overturning those policies.]


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## Meaghan

amfortas said:


> I was always drawn to utilitarianism, but I think it presents problems similar to what has been said just now about science. "*The greatest good for the greatest number*" sounds eminently reasonable, but only if you already hold some unspoken value presuppositions. If I, for example, hold that my own pleasure is the ultimate good, no purely logical argument will persuade me of the utilitarian view.


This basic tenet, however, _must_ be modified a little and equipped with provisions for the protection of minorities (of any kind) if we want to avoid "tyranny of the majority." It seems like a good goal to me to get as close as we can to "the greatest good for the greatest number" without creating the utter misery and deprivation of a smaller number. (I say this with an incomplete understanding of utilitarianism, but these are kind of my thoughts on it.)

Edit: Oops, science pretty much said this.


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## science

I think you're right though, Meaghan, and you said it better than I did.


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## science

I'm loving this conversation, and I really look forward to reading people's responses [pro- and anti-] to my thoughts on authoritarian vs. democratic morality, but it's 3 am and I'm hosting a UU group tomorrow and my internet isn't working too hot, so I'd better go to bed.


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## Ukko

science said:


> I'm loving this conversation, and I really look forward to reading people's responses [pro- and anti-] to my thoughts on authoritarian vs. democratic morality, but it's 3 am and I'm hosting a UU group tomorrow and my internet isn't working too hot, so I'd better go to bed.


That may be the best idea you've had in awhile.


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## Dodecaplex

amfortas said:


> If I, for example, hold that my own pleasure is the ultimate good, no purely logical argument will persuade me of the utilitarian view.


Well, if you, for example, hold that _your_ own pleasure is the ultimate good, and I, for example, hold that _my_ own pleasure is the ultimate good, and we discuss our differing points of view through civilized discourse and rational rumination, then I'm pretty certain we would be able to reach an agreement that could satisfy both parties.


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## amfortas

Dodecaplex said:


> Well, if you, for example, hold that _your_ own pleasure is the ultimate good, and I, for example, hold that _my_ own pleasure is the ultimate good, and we discuss our differing points of view through civilized discourse and rational rumination, then I'm pretty certain we would be able to reach an agreement that could satisfy both parties.


Possibly. But if I don't care about your pleasure (or happiness, or safety) in the first place, why would I bother to have such a discussion with you? Either you're a threat to my own pleasure (in which case I'll combat you) or you're not (in which case I'll ignore you).

I'm not saying most people have such an attitude (I would hope not, at any rate). I'm just suggesting that there's no purely *logical* reason why I should care about anyone else (or even myself, for that matter). Value judgments always come into play.


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## Dodecaplex

amfortas said:


> . . . I'm just suggesting that there's no purely *logical* reason why I should care about anyone else . . .


The logical reason would be mutual interest, which, at least in our modern society, is something that's impossible to escape from.


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## amfortas

Dodecaplex said:


> The logical reason would be mutual interest, which, at least in our modern society, is something that's impossible to escape from.


Exactly. And once again, logic applied to a set of pre-existing values. Which is all I'm saying.


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## Elgarian

Polednice said:


> how can we be _confident_ in our feelings on what is Good? I'm not at all familiar with philosophical thought in this area, but is utilitarianism too simple?


This is THE great philosophical question!!!!! Utilitarianism is just one of the many (unsatisfactory) proposals that have been put forward, and yes, like all the others, it's inadequate.

My own view on this (and I really, really don't want to have to justify it fully here, because life's too short) is that the only way to rescue the concept of 'Good', is to accept it as a _premise_. In other words, 'Goodness' is not something one can argue one's way towards; it's an assumption one has to take for granted at the outset.

There is an alternative, but it inevitably leads to the dissolution of ethics _as_ ethics, and replaces it with relativism: so that we accept that one set of values is just as valid as another, and leave a form of natural selection to resolve the issue by seeing which value system survives in any given society. Unfortunately this completely erodes the meaning of 'good' as we all understand it. 'Good' becomes merely the assertion of one person's preference (or group of people's preferences) over another's. Questions of shame, guilt, and conscience about bad behaviour then become explicable as mere conditioning. But there's a profound problem with that. Once we come to _believe in_ this relativistic evolutionary model of ethics, our shame, guilt, and conscience can be disregarded as mere phantasms of conditioning. It becomes possible to say, 'Aha! This feeling that restrains me from robbing this old lady is only conditioning; it isn't fundamentally _bad_ in any sense to rob her; it's just a feeling. Since I think I can safely get away with robbing her on this occasion, I will over-ride this conditioned feeling and rob her.'

That isn't a workable ethical system; neither is it one that any of us would recognise as one. So you see the problem. Either goodness is a starting point, a premise. Or goodness isn't goodness at all, but a mere preference (asserted, or naturally selected) for one mode of behaviour over another - and then, goodbye to any true ethics as we understand them.


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## Polednice

You needn't go into depths defending your position, Elgarian, but could you clarify some terminology for me?

You make the distinction between arguing one's way towards 'goodness', and taking 'goodness' as an initial presumption.

I can kind of understand your point if not arguing for goodness means accepting that there is no _real_ goodness that can be proven to exist - as such, we have to take for granted the value of being good. But even if we take that as an initial presumption, we're still left with defining what it is, aren't we? I wasn't sure whether you were addressing that or not, and whether or not you were actually saying that goodness can't even be defined...

I'm confusing myself now! I hope what I'm asking is clear.


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## Elgarian

Polednice said:


> I can kind of understand your point if not arguing for goodness means accepting that there is no _real_ goodness that can be proven to exist - as such, we have to take for granted the value of being good. But even if we take that as an initial presumption, we're still left with defining what it is, aren't we? I wasn't sure whether you were addressing that or not, and whether or not you were actually saying that goodness can't even be defined.


Your question's clear enough, though I'm not sure my answer will satisfy you. I'm not sure it satisfies _me_, for that matter. I don't claim to have solved the problem; I'm puzzled and troubled by it. I'm doing no more than reporting on the state I've reached, personally.

But I think what I mean by taking 'goodness' as a premise is that it's something we can all recognise when we experience it, but can't necessarily define. Something we have in common as a 'given'. Something we just 'see'. I'm aware that this is starting to sound quasi-mystical (which you won't like) but I think I have to accept that, even though it may seem disappointing and even feeble. But I think David Hume (whom I've spoken of before, admiringly) would have nodded in approval at this point. I think he'd say I've reached the point where the demand for rational justification simply can't be satisfied; so - accept that good is good, and go and feed the poor. Actually it's a long while since I read Hume on ethics. I'll try to remind myself a bit, and report back if I come up with anything new.


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## Chrythes

"... and leave a form of natural selection to resolve the issue by seeing which value system survives in any given society."
But this has already happened and has been happening for a long time.
You can clearly see some differences between what is good for the Western society and what is good for some African tribe.
It's even possible to see the difference in the perceptions of good between small groups of people - families - in one family you would find that beating a child for something he has done wrong is a good thing - because they think that this is how he will learn not to do it again. While in the other family the behaviour is totally different. 
I think that good in a nutshell is a behaviour that is beneficial for you and for your race. Mutualism is an important factor. 
But why such great variety of goodness exists? It seems that individualism has a lot to do with that - for some it's essential to get away from the herd and establish their own beliefs, moral, goodness. But why does individuality exist at the first place? Is it necessary for our survival?


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## Ukko

Looks like some people here ought to read a book. I suggest "The Faith Instinct" by Nicholas Wade, The Penguin Press - New York - 2009. The first chapter is titled "The Moral Instinct", so you don't need to spend a lot of time on it to gain new insights (or more stuff to scoff at, if that's your preference).


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## science

Should be a good book. I've ordered in and look forward to reading it. 

There're two sides to the picture: we can be really nice to people (especially inside our group) and really horrible to people (especially outside our group).


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## clavichorder

science said:


> Life is not an intelligence contest.


That's a challenging but very smart idea. It goes against my grain, but in the best of ways, I've been thinking about it ever since you posted it.


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## science

clavichorder said:


> That's a challenging but very smart idea. It goes against my grain, but in the best of ways, I've been thinking about it ever since you posted it.


People will look down on you for one thing or another. As long as you disagree with anyone about anything, they'll say you're stupid.

I was the smartest guy who ever went to my high school - a little public school in West Virginia, but _still_ - as measured by various math tests, SATs and so on. Then I got to college, my roommate was three leagues above me, the world champion of the International Physics Olympiad, by a bigger margin than anyone had ever achieved before. And there are geniuses above him.

There will always be millions of people smarter than us, richer than us, better looking than you (I of course, well, naked anyway, am beyond compare), more musically talented or athletically talented or whatever. Best thing to do, I'd guess, is just to relax about it. What really matters? How good you look naked. The rest of it is vanity.


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## Elgarian

Chrythes said:


> "... and leave a form of natural selection to resolve the issue by seeing which value system survives in any given society."
> But this has already happened and has been happening for a long time.


This is why I was so reluctant to embark on this ethical discussion in the first place. There's such vast scope for misunderstanding that any kind of resolution in a forum discussion would be impossible. Could I say though, that there's already a misunderstanding, here, about what I meant (my fault, for not being precise enough in my language). I was asking the question: where does our knowledge of 'goodness' come from? I looked at two alternatives:

1. That 'goodness' is a given; a premise; something 'already there'; something perhaps similar to our innate sense of logic (that is, the faculty that enables us to 'see', without further proof, that if A>B, and B>C, then A>C).
2. That goodness is a concept that has evolved through a form of natural selection.

I then examined no.2 and found (as I explained in my post above, #147) that it does not lead to something that I can recognise as 'goodness' at all. You can get a set of _rules_ that way; but once it's been explained to us how those rules have arisen (assuming this model to be correct), so that we realise that our sense of right and wrong is solely an outcome of conditioning, _we lose the moral imperative._ On these grounds I find no. 2 unacceptable.

Now when you say 'this has been happening for some time', you're dismissing no.1 out of hand, jumping straight in, and assuming that no.2 is the right answer. But I'd insist that the ball is still in play, the game isn't over, and that the no.2 solution is seriously problematic (indeed, virtually self-refuting, as I explained above, #147) as a solution to the philosophical problem. This then leads me to consider what you said next:



> You can clearly see some differences between what is good for the Western society and what is good for some African tribe. It's even possible to see the difference in the perceptions of good between small groups of people - families - in one family you would find that beating a child for something he has done wrong is a good thing - because they think that this is how he will learn not to do it again. While in the other family the behaviour is totally different.


Here it becomes clear that we're talking about two completely different issues. You're talking about sets of rules for good conduct that vary from one society to another, and I'm sure you're right that some sort of natural selection occurs within societies that leads to the development of different moral codes. But that isn't what I'm talking about. I'm talking not about specific codes of conduct, which vary from place to place, and time to time, but about the innate sense of 'the good' that distinguishes ethical decisions from all others. I say again: the moment we settle on a theory that makes ethics merely a matter of preference or conditioning, it's no longer recognisable as ethics.*

*I should acknowledge that nevertheless, no.2 may be right. Our innate sense of 'goodness' may indeed be an illusion, created by conditioning and natural selection. But there's the rub. Once we've had that explained to us, it's all over. The next time someone complains about unfairness, wickedness, or selfishness, and appeals to our conscience, we need do no more than point to the latest edition of 'How Morality Evolved Through Natural Selection', and then shrug, or laugh, or walk away without unease, if we feel so inclined. The complaint 'That's unfair' is no longer seen as an appeal to an innate mutual understanding of fairness, but becomes merely the victim's conditioned response to something he dislikes. It need not trouble us.


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## Dster

We cannot accept others argument because of ego. It is one of the major course of conflict in human society. We reject argument most of the time because it is hard to accept what we hold dear is not what we think it is.


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## Dster

Dodecaplex said:


> You still took the quote out of context, and as a result, distorted Hawking's views.


No I did not. I quoted his null hypothsis in verbatim. :devil:


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## Ukko

science said:


> People will look down on you for one thing or another. As long as you disagree with anyone about anything, they'll say you're stupid.
> 
> I was the smartest guy who ever went to my high school - a little public school in West Virginia, but _still_ - as measured by various math tests, SATs and so on. Then I got to college, my roommate was three leagues above me, the world champion of the International Physics Olympiad, by a bigger margin than anyone had ever achieved before. And there are geniuses above him.
> [...]


To a considerably lesser degree, my experience was similar to _Science_'s. I had a very high opinion of my intelligence in high school. I didn't get the 'jumping in cold' shock treatment of college, so it took a bit longer to figure out that being in the 90th percentile means there are many, many folks out there who could (and certainly can now) dance on my head.

At this point in my life, I have some concern about senility, and get as much mental exercise as I can handle. I am so enthusiastic about the mental exercise remedy that I (_unthinkingly_) pass on the opportunity to others, by use of non-obvious metaphor and incomplete thought processes. This habit, which became ingrained some time ago, has caused some annoyance among our membership. I probably won't break the habit, but do apologize for the inconvenience.

I wore a tux on one occasion, and several ladies (not relatives) said I looked real good. Haven't heard that comment addressed to me since.


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## science

Elgarian said:


> 2. That goodness is a concept that has evolved through a form of natural selection.
> 
> I then examined no.2 and found (as I explained in my post above, #147) that it does not lead to something that I can recognise as 'goodness' at all. You can get a set of _rules_ that way; but once it's been explained to us how those rules have arisen (assuming this model to be correct), so that we realise that our sense of right and wrong is solely an outcome of conditioning, _we lose the moral imperative._ On these grounds I find no. 2 unacceptable.
> 
> ...
> 
> I say again: the moment we settle on a theory that makes ethics merely a matter of preference or conditioning, it's no longer recognisable as ethics.*
> 
> *I should acknowledge that nevertheless, no.2 may be right. Our innate sense of 'goodness' may indeed be an illusion, created by conditioning and natural selection. But there's the rub. Once we've had that explained to us, it's all over. The next time someone complains about unfairness, wickedness, or selfishness, and appeals to our conscience, we need do no more than point to the latest edition of 'How Morality Evolved Through Natural Selection', and then shrug, or laugh, or walk away without unease, if we feel so inclined. The complaint 'That's unfair' is no longer seen as an appeal to an innate mutual understanding of fairness, but becomes merely the victim's conditioned response to something he dislikes. It need not trouble us.


I don't see this line of reasoning.

The conscience or the sense of goodness is innate, even if it is a product of natural selection (which I think we should distinguish from "conditioned responses" as that sounds like something learned during the individual's lifetime).

Almost all humans (maybe all) have this sense of goodness, so we can still discuss it together, complain to each other of unfairness and so on.

Or, putting it differently, I have this innate sense of goodness, you have one too; we can work with it together - no matter where it came from. Coming from within us is _at least_ as good as coming from above us.


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## Polednice

I'm getting a little bit confused by people's uses of the term "natural selection" - as far as I can tell, some of you are talking about the cultural evolution of 'goodness' as a concept, while others are talking more strictly about our biological evolution. Be specific to help my little brain out. 

In response to Elgarian's points, I remain a little bit baffled! You give the following two options:

1) Goodness is a premise; something already inherent to be taken as a starting point, for granted.
2) Goodness is something that has evolved (I think, in this case, you are talking about cultural evolution).

Looking back over the posts on this page, I'm not sure any more what people are arguing and what I should be addressing! Briefly then, I shall just say that it seems to me that we should accept an innate premise of 'goodness' within us _which has arisen_ thanks to _biological_ evolution.

This potentially still presents the difficulty that Elgarian described, in that, if we can dismantle the origins of our sense of morality (and if those origins are indeed through evolution), then there is nothing objectively good about them (them not having been decreed by an authority), and so we can discard them. But if their evolutionary history as we see it is indeed true, what are we to do - deny our biological history? I think instead we just have to acknowledge the fact and still take our starting point as a recognition that all humans have this innate sense, regardless of being conscious of its subjectivity, and so we should take it for granted.


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## Polednice

P.S. Of course, if the above allows us to determine that 'goodness' is good, we still haven't defined what goodness is! 

Perhaps if we start from our most fundamental desire to survive and have our species persist, we can derive goodness from that? Maybe through arguments that centre around complex social interactions, we can claim that happiness both individually _and_ across the species is essential to avoid conflict which, given our technological capabilities, could result in total self-extermination. That's a thought that could be fleshed out with many thousands more words, but it's just a little something for now in case you want to rip it apart.


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## Elgarian

science said:


> I don't see this line of reasoning.


I'm not surprised. It's taken me about 20 years to understand the full implications of it (the argument isn't mine). But that's as clearly as I can explain it in a short space, I'm afraid, and I don't think I can do any better. I could argue a case refuting your specific statements, but I'd really only be repeating, in different words and slightly different contexts, what I've said already; and I think you'd find them equally unconvincing.

What I _will_ say is that what you describe (about sharing the sense of goodness, etc) is indeed what human beings _do_, and take for granted. We agree on that. I maintain, however, that it's necessary to explore and understand the full philosophical implications of that; but it's very difficult to do, and to grasp clearly.



> Coming from within us is at least as good as coming from above us.


Just to be clear: I wasn't saying anything about whether the origin of the ethical impulse was within, without, above or below us. I did at one point in my post (as an aside) speculate that it comes, possibly, from the same kind of source as our logical impulse. But that's just a hunch, and I wouldn't attempt to defend it.


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## Elgarian

Polednice said:


> This potentially still presents the difficulty that Elgarian described, in that, if we can dismantle the origins of our sense of morality (and if those origins are indeed through evolution), then there is nothing objectively good about them


Yes! Excellent so far!



> (them not having been decreed by an authority)


Woah... stop there. I certainly didn't imply that. That's a leap too far, unless you regard, for example, the law of gravity as an authority. I'm _not_ trying to smuggle in an authoritarian deity in disguise. I'm talking about contemplating the idea that 'goodness' is somehow inherent in the universe, or in our relationship with it, in the same sort of way as the laws of physics are inherent (insofar as we understand what they are, which understanding of course is very imperfect).

Also, bear in mind that we aren't going to escape the conclusion demonstrated by Hume in the 18th century (once and for all, I think), that rational thought can only get us so far in these matters. Ultimately we bang up against the 'abyss of unknowing' (my expression, not Hume's, but I quite like it).


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## Polednice

Elgarian said:


> Woah... stop there. I certainly didn't imply that.


Sorry, yes, I was unclear about where your thoughts stopped and mine began! I didn't think you were trying to smuggle in a deity.



Elgarian said:


> I'm talking about contemplating the idea that 'goodness' is somehow inherent in the universe, or in our relationship with it, in the same sort of way as the laws of physics are inherent (insofar as we understand what they are, which understanding of course is very imperfect).


Now this is an interesting point, given the universal perspective. Are you suggesting, then, that there would be 'goodness' even if life didn't exist? Or perhaps if just human life didn't exist? I imagine 'goodness' as being totally dependent on the existence of a sentient species, and is only then applicable to that one species alone. What's good for a cuckoo isn't good for a reed warbler...


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## Hazel

Will someone please tell me how to subscribe to a particular thread so as to receive notices even if I have not posted anything? Thank you.


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## science

I'm going to step back and watch the conversation between Polednice and Elgarian. I don't understand Elgarian, and Polednice makes about the same points I would anyway.


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## Hazel

science said:


> Life is not an intelligence contest.


That is the best line I have heard in a long while. Thank you.


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## science

Hazel said:


> That is the best line I have heard in a long while. Thank you.


You're welcome of course. Don't miss the one about looking good naked. That is the sum of human wisdom.


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## Chrythes

I'm going to join science on this.
As Poley has already asked what i was planning to ask as a response to your post dedicated to mine - Does goodness exist without human life? Do you believe that goodness can be observed in animals? If you consider empathy and comforting a victim as some sort of goodness (it was hinted in your proposed situation of unfairness) then it's possible to say that it exists in nature as well (maybe in a more - primitive- way?), as chimpanzees feel empathy towards other chimpanzees in certain situations.

Oh, and just an interesting talk on TED -


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## Elgarian

Polednice said:


> Are you suggesting, then, that there would be 'goodness' even if life didn't exist?.


That's not the conclusion I intended to imply. I was thinking around the idea of the 'laws of physics', for example, as an essentially human mental construct. Those laws seem to correspond to something 'out there', but we don't know what, exactly. So we have the _idea_ of, let's say, 'the law of gravitation', which can predict behaviour quite well; and which seems in some sense to be fundamental (all masses are subject to it) but what the underlying reality is that the law is mimicking, we can never know. (In this case, we _know_ the underlying reality is NOT the same as the law of Newtonian gravitation, which can be refuted. Doesn't matter - the point is to differentiate between the model in our heads, and the reality 'out there'.) So in every case, there's something out there governing the particles of the universe which we can never know about, intrinsically, but we have a mental construct that's capable of mimicking it to some degree.

Now, what I'm toying with - purely speculatively, and with no intention to persuade anyone - is that there might be some fundamental property of the universe to which our human notion of 'goodness' is a parallel. I can't think of any way of testing the idea; and the only reason I mention it at all is because of (what I've argued is) the self-destructing nature of ethics based on relativism.

I haven't been able to get back to this discussion for all sorts of reasons - and these posts take a long time, not to write, but to think about before writing. Anyway, I need to drop out at this point.


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## GoneBaroque

Elgarian said:


> So in every case, there's something out there governing the particles of the universe which we can never know about, intrinsically, but we have a mental construct that's capable of mimicking it to some degree.
> 
> Now, what I'm toying with - purely speculatively, and with no intention to persuade anyone - is that there might be some fundamental property of the universe to which our human notion of 'goodness' is a parallel. I can't think of any way of testing the idea; and the only reason I mention it at all is because of (what I've argued is) the self-destructing nature of ethics based on relativism.


Merely because a concept is neither provable or non-provable does not imply that it is implausible. If we can accept for the sake of argument that there is some fundamental property of the universe to which our human notion of 'goodness' is a parallel and are able to extend our thinking to regard that fundamental property as the Artificer of the Universe then anything created by the force of that property; whether it be human, animal, vegetable, mineral or universal law of nature must contain that inherent goodness.


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## Chrythes

Elgarian, I should have quoted your post to make it more clear, but as i've asked before - do you see the same fundamental goodness in other creatures?
What do you think about empathy observed in chimpanzees? Is that not some kind of goodness or sense of 'fairness' as you mentioned before?
Isn't what you suggest is in a sense some sort of Monadology?


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## Elgarian

Chrythes said:


> Elgarian, I should have quoted your post to make it more clear, but as i've asked before - do you see the same fundamental goodness in other creatures?
> What do you think about empathy observed in chimpanzees? Is that not some kind of goodness or sense of 'fairness' as you mentioned before?
> Isn't what you suggest is in a sense some sort of Monadology?


First, I should say that I have no clear understanding (or anything but the slightest knowledge) of the work of Leibnitz (more's the pity). But even so, I think my suggestion is so tentative, so vague, so incomplete, that it couldn't qualify as any kind of -ology.

Second, I'm driven towards such an idea not because I think there's compelling evidence, or a convincing argument, _for_ it, as such, but because I find the alternative (let's call it 'evolutionary ethics'), while capable of generating behaviouristic codes of behaviour, is _incapable_ of producing something I can recognise as a genuine moral imperative.

Third, since we aren't chimpanzees ourselves, we can't know what they experience when they appear to be exhibiting kindness etc., so I don't think we can conclude anything about their ethical impulses from merely observing their behaviour, and I'd rather leave them out of the discussion. As humans, however, we are especially 'in the know'. We know what empathy is like from the _inside_, so to speak. We know what it's like to understand a moral imperative - we know the word 'ought' has a special meaning to us, like no other. It's that particular notion (terribly hard to explain clearly) which poses the particular philosophical problem that troubles me.

Fourth, it may seem absurd to suggest that 'goodness' is in some way fundamental to the universe. After all, one only has to lift the nearest stone to become aware of the appalling indifference of the universe to the plight of the living creatures that inhabit it. There's no suggestion of discerning 'goodness' there. One cannot observe the universe in general and deduce the existence of goodness, that's for sure. What I'm contemplating is not that, but the '_idea_ of goodness' as an insight into something fundamental. Of course behaviourists will insist that such subjective notions have purely electrochemical explanations (ultimately) and will wonder why I'm making a fuss about it all; but that's because they haven't understood the nature of the philosophical problem.

[One last thing: I know Poley is troubled by talking about a concept ('goodness') that remains undefined, but that's always the case with fundamental concepts. They are things we simply 'know about', where there is no more fundamental concept that can be referenced in order to construct a definition. Try defining 'space' for example, or 'time', without resorting to tautology. Yet these are concepts we handle casually in conversation every day, and we understand each other perfectly well when we do.]


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## Polednice

There are many things of interest here, but I'm low on time so I'll just pick on one thing that stuck out.



Elgarian said:


> Third, since we aren't chimpanzees ourselves, we can't know what they experience when they appear to be exhibiting kindness etc., so I don't think we can conclude anything about their ethical impulses from merely observing their behaviour, and I'd rather leave them out of the discussion. As humans, however, we are especially 'in the know'. We know what empathy is like from the _inside_, so to speak. We know what it's like to understand a moral imperative - we know the word 'ought' has a special meaning to us, like no other. It's that particular notion (terribly hard to explain clearly) which poses the particular philosophical problem that troubles me.


I'm not convinced that this is a fair distinction to make. Yes, as conscious beings, we share an understanding of our own empathy. However, we do not all feel and experience the same kind of empathy or the same ethical impulses. In order to come to any significant conclusions about the ethical thoughts and behaviours of mankind, it's necessary to observe our species as a whole. In many instances, this will require an objective, emotional detachment, as we may find a multitude of 'ethical' behaviours in some cultures that seem repugnant to us and vice-versa.

Given this necessity for a species-wide view with a certain degree of objectivity, I think we can actually fairly say that we can learn something of chimpanzees' (and other animals') ethical impulses by observing patterns in their behaviour. We may not be capable of understanding them on an emotional level, but that is often true between two humans.


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## science

Elgarian, it seems to me that you know the ethical imperative exists; you simply aren't willing to locate it within us. I suspect you feel that if it is a human thing, it doesn't _really_ exist: as if, in that case, it isn't really _imperative_.

I'd say, on the contrary, it's more imperative than it would be if it were only above or without us.

It might be analogous to the mystic's thesis that the gods (or ultimate reality or whatever) are more real if they are subjective than if they are objective.


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## science

BTW, Polednice - good to have you back!


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## Elgarian

science said:


> Elgarian, it seems to me that you know the ethical imperative exists; you simply aren't willing to locate it within us. I suspect you feel that if it is a human thing, it doesn't _really_ exist: as if, in that case, it isn't really _imperative_.


It's very strange - we seem to be incapable of understanding each other and I don't know why. I don't understand, for example, how you could reach this conclusion from what I've been saying. The _location_ of the moral imperative is irrelevant to the ideas I'm exploring, except that of course it's within us in _some_ sense. We couldn't experience it, otherwise. The Law of Gravitation is also _within_ us. It's a mental model that runs parallel, in some measure, to something (we know not what) 'out there'. I'm speculating (it is no more than specualtion) that the moral imperative might exist in the same sort of relationship, or something like it, having found the alternative to be inadequate (indeed, virtually self-refuting).

My objection, then, is not to the moral imperative's 'within-ness', but to the hypothesis of 'naturally-selected ethics', which (by the kind of _reductio-ad-absurdum_ argument that I've explained above) is incapable of producing anything recognisable as a real moral imperative. But you'll say you don't understand my point, and we'll go round in circles. I'm really sorry, but I don't know what to do about that. I'm already more or less repeating myself, because I can't explain the point better than I have already.


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## Elgarian

Polednice said:


> I'm not convinced that this is a fair distinction to make. Yes, as conscious beings, we share an understanding of our own empathy. However, we do not all feel and experience the same kind of empathy or the same ethical impulses. In order to come to any significant conclusions about the ethical thoughts and behaviours of mankind, it's necessary to observe our species as a whole. In many instances, this will require an objective, emotional detachment, as we may find a multitude of 'ethical' behaviours in some cultures that seem repugnant to us and vice-versa.
> 
> Given this necessity for a species-wide view with a certain degree of objectivity, I think we can actually fairly say that we can learn something of chimpanzees' (and other animals') ethical impulses by observing patterns in their behaviour. We may not be capable of understanding them on an emotional level, but that is often true between two humans.


We're talking about quite different things here. My whole argument hangs on our perception of the moral imperative as a real moral imperative, not as some theoretical construct or behavioural code. It's something that can only be experienced - not something that can be observed from without. It's comparable with the conception of _qualia_, such as the taste of strawberries. So, we can measure every conceivable chemical, physical and biological aspect of strawberries, and analyse all the brain chemistry and physiological changes that occur when we eat a strawberry, but when all is done, to understand the experience of tasting a strawberry, we have actually to _eat _one. Only when we eat one do we understand what the experience is like.

Now the moral imperative is like that. I know what the moral imperative is because I experience it. I know what it 'tastes' like. I know, therefore, that if someone 'explains away' the idea of 'goodness' through natural selection (and if I believe them), my conception of 'goodness', as goodness, is destroyed. I've 'seen through it', as it were. This whole process isn't something we can explore by observing chimpanzees.

[sorry - called away in mid-post!]


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## Polednice

science said:


> BTW, Polednice - good to have you back!


Thanks! We'll see how long it lasts.  This is too good a thread to just abandon, but I'm wary about starting new ones or joining others with certain participants.

Elgarian, I often feel like I don't understand you either, so I hope my points won't become tiresome for you to read!

Something I have particular trouble with is your notion that a biologically reduced moral imperative is not satisfactory because it would no longer be an imperative. I think this is akin to wishful thinking and the religious argument that it's good to believe even if god doesn't exist because it's nice/good for us. Surely the only intellectually honest pursuit is to accept the facts for what they are, no matter how unappealing they may be.

Moral 'imperative' is an interesting word - it seems to suggest a command or demand external to ourselves. I don't think this is the case though, and I think it's very strange indeed to liken a moral sense with a scientific model as if they are both representations of forces beyond us. On the most general level, I think morals are entirely intrinsic to our own species, and there is no imperative as such, except in the sense that we must all accept certain standards of morality if we want to continue to exist. Luckily, we are helped along in this by certain evolutionary instincts.

And finally, if someone were to explain to you the entire collection of physical processes involved in tasting a strawberry, would you suddenly lose the experience and conception of its taste because you can now 'see through it'?


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## Ukko

According to the conclusions (scientific) in the book "The Faith Instinct" (which _Science_ says he has on order), there exists a moral instinct, and an overlying moral reasoning which, if I read it correctly, mostly serves to justify/rationalize the instinct. I suppose 'imperative' is one way to refer to the combination?


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## Elgarian

Polednice said:


> Something I have particular trouble with is your notion that a biologically reduced moral imperative is not satisfactory because it would no longer be an imperative. I think this is akin to wishful thinking and the religious argument that it's good to believe even if god doesn't exist because it's nice/good for us. Surely the only intellectually honest pursuit is to accept the facts for what they are, no matter how unappealing they may be.


I think - if you'll forgive this digression - you're ignoring all you know of the way I tackle this stuff: that is, from a position of agnosticism. I have no vested interest in the outcome, whereas (I might point out, if I wanted to play the game in the same way), you do. So can we please ditch this "surely the only intellectually honest position" kind of approach, please? It is possible for someone to be intellectually honest _and not share your opinion_. To be frank, after so many years of pursuing various philosophical avenues (among many others) to the best of my ability, with the close attention that I have, I regard the implication that my approach is driven by wishful thinking and intellectual dishonesty as a pretty cheap shot. I've never maintained that my opinions are the only correct ones. I've never expressed a desire for a particular outcome. But I often can tell faulty reasoning when I encounter it, whichever way it argues.

Taking now this particular statement:


> Something I have particular trouble with is your notion that a biologically reduced moral imperative is not satisfactory because it would no longer be an imperative.


That you have trouble with it doesn't surprise me. I've had trouble working my way through these issues for many years, and they aren't simple. If they could be explained easily in a handful of internet posts, that would be very nice, but they can't be. I appreciate that you don't understand my arguments about the moral imperative, and I sympathise. But they aren't my ideas, actually; they're based almost entirely on the contemplation, long and deep, of some of the best thinking of some of the most sharply honed minds there have ever been. I don't claim that what I say is right; I do claim that it is as well informed as I've been able to make it.

Now. The fact that you haven't understood my argument is, as I say, something I sympathise with - after a life full of struggling to understand things I don't understand. But a failure to grasp an argument does NOT constitute a refutation of it. Neither does it justify talk of wishful thinking and intellectual dishonesty on the part of the person who tried to explain the argument.

The final outcome is: I quit.


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## Polednice

I think I was fairly clear in saying that your argument _sounded to me_ like wishful thinking (thus not a direct derogatory accusation, especially given that my general tone in this thread has been genuine and genial), and my statement that intellectual honesty is about accepting hard facts said nothing in particular of where you fit in terms of such honesty. It was a general observation _just in case_ my characterization of your position was correct (and, by the way, I would defend my observation no matter how much heartfelt thought had been put into an idea that opposes that principle), but I thought it was obvious that, as is most often the case, I was open to you telling me that I had simply misunderstood.

Indeed, as usual, my post was an invitation for you to clarify your points, while demonstrating what I needed to be clarified by expressing my reaction. I believe I did this in a polite manner, without pointing any fingers or directing any cruel comments, but the internet is as bad at delivering philosophical consistency as it is at conveying tone.

I'm still happy to chat to anyone else on this topic if they fancy it.


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## science

Hilltroll72 said:


> According to the conclusions (scientific) in the book "The Faith Instinct" (which _Science_ says he has on order), there exists a moral instinct, and an overlying moral reasoning which, if I read it correctly, mostly serves to justify/rationalize the instinct. I suppose 'imperative' is one way to refer to the combination?


I'm about half finished, but I've gotten through the moral chapter. I don't think it was trying to justify or rationalize the moral instinct, but to explain how natural selection might have made one. The instinct itself contains the imperative that we feel. It's not a rational or a justified thing.


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## Polednice

science said:


> I'm about half finished, but I've gotten through the moral chapter. I don't think it was trying to justify or rationalize the moral instinct, but to explain how natural selection might have made one. The instinct itself contains the imperative that we feel. It's not a rational or a justified thing.


I think that perhaps our desire to rationalise our moral instincts is just an urge that we have to get rid of - like seeking patterns where they don't exist.

As has been mentioned before, the potential 'danger' is that explaining morality completely in biological terms removes the imperative. I don't think this is true. What it removes is the _external_ rationale, the intellectual argument, but whether you like it or not, your evolutionary history pre-determines that you _will_ feel the moral sense unless you're a psychopath. If we can take other things to be given premises in philosophy, why not this?

Thus I think it is much more important and useful to us not to consider _where_ goodness comes from or _why_ we ought to be good, but instead _what_ goodness is, and how we deduce it from our instincts.


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## science

Polednice said:


> I think that perhaps our desire to rationalise our moral instincts is just an urge that we have to get rid of - like seeking patterns where they don't exist.
> 
> As has been mentioned before, the potential 'danger' is that explaining morality completely in biological terms removes the imperative. I don't think this is true. What it removes is the _external_ rationale, the intellectual argument, but whether you like it or not, your evolutionary history pre-determines that you _will_ feel the moral sense unless you're a psychopath. If we can take other things to be given premises in philosophy, why not this?
> 
> Thus I think it is much more important and useful to us not to consider _where_ goodness comes from or _why_ we ought to be good, but instead _what_ goodness is, and how we deduce it from our instincts.


I guess "rationalise our moral instincts" could mean a few different things. At first that phrase put me in mind of "moral reasoning." Evidently (if the psychologists are right) our moral reasoning is all (or almost all) post-hoc. But still, I'd guess it serves a purpose: I think on occasion persuasion is even possible, but more commonly the point is for a community to be able to understand its members points-of-view so that the mores can be negotiated without unnecessarily or excessively alienating anyone. (There may be a kind of selection at work too: whoever is best at justifying his/her intuitions gets some extra prestige; the worst are likely to lose out on some privileges. But this is not obviously desirable, just a thing that might be going on.)

But then I realized that "rationalise our moral instincts" might mean something like "place morality as a whole systematically on a logical basis." Hmmmmm. Don't know one way or the other how we might respond to that.

One thing going on in this conversation is that we all feel like morality is something from outside of us. When we say something like "things ought to be fair," we feel like we're talking about an objective fact that would be true regardless of whether humanity existed or not. We don't feel like we're doing something equivalent to a hen saying "eggs ought to be sat upon" or a rabbit saying "foxes ought to be fled from."

But what if we are? People resist this idea so resolutely that I wonder if something really is at stake: perhaps there are people that would not respect their moral intuitions as much if they perceived them as instincts rather than as objective truths. I _think _that _might_ be what Elgarian meant by this idea meaning that there would be "no genuine moral imperative." The word "genuine" might be key. If not for him, then at least for others, they need to feel that their instincts correspond to objective reality, at least in principle.

The gravity analogy is interesting. Elgarian didn't explore the idea of innate physics - our intuitive sense that things fall and so on - but it's worth a thought. He's not saying that our intuitive physics corresponds to the truth about the universe, but that at least there is some truth to which our intuitive physics gives a rough enough 1st approximation - and so analogously, perhaps there is some objective moral truth to which our intuitive ethics gives a rough enough 1st approximation.

Ok, simple enough. I'd easily get hung up on how wrong our intuitive physics is, and probably also on how diverse moral intuitions are compared to our physical intuitions.

But I think the thing is, knowing that our ideas of "up" and "down" don't mean anything in a cosmic sense, that is, knowing that our basic intution about gravity is fundamentally nonsense - hardly changes our lives. We can still throw baseballs and drive cars; only when we set about doing something like calculating the orbits of Mercury or designing GPS systems do we bother to systematically ignore our intuitions. And when we do realize that "up" and "down" are objectively meaningless terms, we might experience a few moments of something like vertigo, but we don't permanently lose our ability to walk or manipulate a glass of water.

If the analogy to gravity was initially meaningful, I think it must still be. When we realize to our surprise that our moral intuitions are a mix of instincts and conditioning, we might experience something like moral vertigo. We'll feel for awhile that nothing means anything, that nothing is _really_ imperative or forbidden, we could be disoriented for quite a while.

I know I _was_. I've told the story before: I lost my faith, I was depressed for a long time. I felt that nothing had meaning. Then I had a particularly powerful moral experience, and thinking about that experience I realized that even if nothing had cosmic objective meaning, things had meanings to _me_ - and I had no reason to surrender my internal sense of meaning to the cosmos' incomprehension.

That's the key intuition. We don't have to surrender our sense of "up" and "down" or "right" and "wrong" or "worthless" and "important." These terms mean a lot to us: when the cookies fall on the ground, we're allowed to be sad: we do not have to reflect that in a cosmic sense the plate was never really under the cookies, that in a cosmic sense sharing the cookies was not imperative, or that in a cosmic sense cookies are just particles.

We do not require cosmic validation.

I think that gets us the "genuine moral imperative" we want so badly. Fact is, I want to be a good person, I want people to think I'm a good person, and I want you to be a good person too. If I can't justify these desires to a calculator or crocodile, fine. I don't need to do anything like that.

Furthermore, what are we to say to the psychopath who doesn't feel the imperative. Perhaps it will help to tell him that there are spirits who will hurt him if he violates their laws, based on whatever they may be. Perhaps not. I don't know about that. But this much I'm sure of: we should let him know that if he violates our laws, based (as democratic laws in principle are) on our widely shared moral intuitions, _we_ will hurt him. This idea that we can only enforce God's laws and not or own - I don't buy it. (And in fact, "God's laws" in practice turn out to mean some group's - especially some aristocracy's - laws.)

There it is. I've got to go~~~


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## science

That post, BTW, ties back to the thread topic: confidence in our beliefs.


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## Polednice

science said:


> If the analogy to gravity was initially meaningful, I think it must still be. When we realize to our surprise that our moral intuitions are a mix of instincts and conditioning, we might experience something like moral vertigo. We'll feel for awhile that nothing means anything, that nothing is _really_ imperative or forbidden, we could be disoriented for quite a while.


I think this is a wonderful way of describing it - it's a feeling I have frequently, and which informed the creation of this thread.

Just as another little point on the 'imperative no longer there if explained biologically' point - I think that's basically the same argument as suggesting that, if our morals are dictated by a higher being but, one day, we found that the higher being doesn't exist, we'd all go crazy and start killing each other. Of course we wouldn't (with exceptions, of course!), and that's testament to morals being an _internal_ phenomenon that we will always experience despite explanation.

The difficulty that I see is that, in my own godless worldview, how can our evolutionary instincts inform us on complex social topics that were never a concern in our distant past? For example (and don't argue this _specific_ point please, it is just an example), what does my innate, evolutionarily developed sense say about gay marriage? Nothing. However, I think that an answer can be derived from the more basic idea of "live and let live" and everyone having a right to a happiness that doesn't infringe on others' rights - these do (I think) have analogues in our evolved moral sense.

Troubles arise when we start conflating our inner moral sense with an external one which, in whatever of a million possible guises it might have - religious or philosophical - I don't think exists. Having said that, if my notion is right that all external authorities are false, they must all be of human creation, and so what do the commands we claim came from above say of our inner morals?!?!


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## Scarpia

Elgarian said:


> We're talking about quite different things here. My whole argument hangs on our perception of the moral imperative as a real moral imperative, not as some theoretical construct or behavioural code. It's something that can only be experienced - not something that can be observed from without. It's comparable with the conception of _qualia_, such as the taste of strawberries. So, we can measure every conceivable chemical, physical and biological aspect of strawberries, and analyse all the brain chemistry and physiological changes that occur when we eat a strawberry, but when all is done, to understand the experience of tasting a strawberry, we have actually to _eat _one. Only when we eat one do we understand what the experience is like.
> 
> Now the moral imperative is like that. I know what the moral imperative is because I experience it. I know what it 'tastes' like. I know, therefore, that if someone 'explains away' the idea of 'goodness' through natural selection (and if I believe them), my conception of 'goodness', as goodness, is destroyed. I've 'seen through it', as it were. This whole process isn't something we can explore by observing chimpanzees.


I can't help but think your objecting is analogous to Einstein's, whose objection to QM was that he just didn't find it satisfying.



> Quantum mechanics is certainly imposing. But an inner voice tells me that it is not yet the real thing. The theory says a lot, but does not really bring us any closer to the secret of the "old one." I, at any rate, am convinced that He does not throw dice.


(My goal is to soften you up to my argument by comparing you to Einstein.)

I do not understand why the moral imperative would loose its _taste _if we were to understand where it originates? I don't see why it's power would be broken. Are there really good people who would go out murdering and raping and pillaging if you whispered to them that there is no hell and they will not suffer eternal damnation if god observes them violating the commandments?

My point of view, put simply, is as follows. Look at the natural world. Birds feed their young, lions hunt in groups and share their kills, etc. Lower animals have behaviors in which they sacrifice their well being for that of their group that are largely determined by pre-programmed instinct. It is obvious why natural selection would favor such instincts. Humans also have instincts, but humans also have self-consciousness and higher reasoning that oversees the instinctive brain. Morality is the rationalization of those instinctive behaviors.

Looking at the behavior of human primitives, I see an us-vs-them mentality wired into the human brain. Humans cooperate with people who are perceived as "one of us" (our clan, our villiage, our football team) and compete, sometimes brutally, with aliens. The role of religion, civilization, morality, is to keep the human working in "us" mode and to suppress the use of "them" mode, which is reserved for wars and rival football teams. If you take away the religious justification for the moral imperative, you still have fact that being moral feels good. You loose the fact that god is a better jailer than any human institution, since he is always watching.


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## Chi_townPhilly

Scarpia said:


> If you take away the religious justification for the moral imperative, you still have fact that being moral *feels good.* (emphasis mine)


The answer to this, of course, is Ravi Zacharias':


> *"In some cultures, people are taught to love their fellow man, and in others, they're taught to eat their fellow man- and both claim to operate on the basis of feeling.
> 
> "Do you distinguish between the two?!"*


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## science

@ Zacharias - I'd like to know any proven examples of either kind of culture, but I get the point he's trying to make. Answer is, yeah, I make moral judgments.


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## science

Scarpio's post about "human primitives" and us vs. them initially set me to thinking about depleted uranium bombs in Iraq and so on, but then I went on to think about what really dictates our behavior. 

Even among people who identify with a Zoroastrian-style religion (with a God sitting in judgment, eternal punishments or rewards in heaven and hell, good vs. evil right at the center of the mythology), it seems to me that most of them don't go through their lives thinking things like "God is watching me, and I don't want to burn in hell." 

What really motivates us, I think, is self-interest. I don't want to be known as the kind of guy who does whatever immoral acts you have in mind; I want to be known as the kind of guy who does what my community values. That is a very powerful motivation. I suspect that on a subconscious level, this kind of thing powerfully motivates us in every aspect of our lives, including, say, our musical "tastes."


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## Ukko

Chi_townPhilly said:


> The answer to this, of course, is Ravi Zacharias':


Zacharias' use of 'fellow man' is the cause of this confusion. In cultures where cannibalism exists, the eaten are not 'fellow men'. They are at least non-members of the community, and often not considered to be people at all. The term 'the people applies only to the community/tribe/'nation'.


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