Argument from truth
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gaara4158
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Me neither, but what we’re discussing now is whether it’s possible to do so without assuming the existence of a mind at all points in time. The OP is trying to argue for the negative position, and I don’t think we’ve seen good justification for it.Definitely not against searching out the truth
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gaara4158
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The negative position, as in to claim that it is NOT possible to have truth (defined as statements that match reality) about a reality wherein no minds exist, has not been justified in this thread. There are other ways to verify (to a reasonable extent) things that occurred in the past that were not witnessed by anyone with a mind.
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Chriliman
Everything I need to be joyful is right here
Well, you’d need at least one mind to make any statements about a reality where no other minds exist. The question becomes whether the first mind came to be by chance or whether it came to be by a previous, uncaused mind. And which position can be justified?
Not witnessed by a human being, yes.
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gaara4158
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Right, and the mind that is required to make that statement only has to exist at the time the statement is made, not at the time that is being described.
I’m not sure we had examined that second question, but my position there is that minds appear to arise from — or at least correlate with — complex brain function, so it would follow that the first minds appeared with the first sufficiently evolved brains. Whether minds are entirely reducible to brain function is another question, but for now it appears unnecessary to postulate a “first, uncaused mind” to explain the existence of minds today.
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Chriliman
Everything I need to be joyful is right here
As a theist, I'm open to the possibility that God somehow came to be by chance and will live forever, though this isn't the traditional Christian view. Either way, I fully expect the truth to come from God, whether he's eternal or made by chance to live forever, anything less would not be God.
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gaara4158
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Well, if you’re open to something like God coming about by chance I don’t see why you shouldn’t be open to the idea of this whole universe coming about by chance instead.
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zippy2006
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Okay, great.
Determining whether God is trustworthy is only different from determining whether a human is trustworthy due to the fact that we know God in a different way than we know humans. (By "we" I am simply referring to the historical human race.) I don't have a simple answer to your question, and much of it depends on the religious tradition in question. In Catholicism the conception of God is influenced by a mixture of scripture, religious tradition, and philosophical inquiry, so the way that God is like and unlike human persons is determined by those factors.
"1. If you don't have a reason to believe someone is deceitful then the possibility that they are deceiving you should be remote."
I don't mind if they are poles on a spectrum, but the function that describes them isn't a stepwise/binary function... Suppose trust and suspicion of deceit are poles on a spectrum. What then lies in the center? Neither trust nor suspicion of deceit. Just a mild openness, such as when you meet a completely new person.
Your argument relies on the premise that if I do not have suspicion of deceit then I have "complete trust." That's not true. Complete trust does exclude suspicion of deceit, but so does the mild openness of a new encounter. Perhaps the median of the spectrum does have more "suspicion of deceit" in a sort of passive sense, but instead of saying that it includes both trust and suspicion of deceit, I would find it more accurate to say that it includes neither (or minuscule amounts of both).
Is it? It doesn't seem to me that the species of the assertive act is even the same. A teacher wants her students to believe something, so she makes assertions intended to determine or shape their (permanent) belief. The Renaissance was a time of artistic renewal. A housing bubble caused the stock market crash. She wants them to believe something. As you say, "Her intent is to cause them to believe something."
Now take the liar. He also wants his interlocutor to believe something, but something that is contrary to truth. Nixon tells us he played no role in Watergate. He wants us to believe a falsehood, plain and simple.
Is the person who tells a joke a liar? You say that they too "intend to cause you to believe a falsehood," yet "believe" in this sentence means something rather different from what is meant in the two truth-assertions above (assertions intended to shape the long-term epistemic status of the mind you are speaking to). You're not asking them to believe something so much as to entertain something. The locution is simply not intended to influence their epistemic apparatus (and is therefore technically not an 'assertion' at all). The locution is not about reality, it is about a counterfactual, fictional, imaginative proposition, and unlike the liar scenario this proposition is proposed as imaginative. Perhaps the interlocutor believes you are asserting rather than joking, but eventually they "catch on" and recognize the intention of your original locution. In my opinion they would come to the common conclusion that it was not intended to deceive them, and was therefore not a lie.
Humor doesn't even function if the listener is fully deceived. If he has no "sense of humor"--and humor is an acquired taste--then he will not understand the intentional difference between an assertion and a joke, he will not laugh, and he will not frequent the comedy club. If the listeners thought they were simply being lied to then the comedians would quit or alter their approach because they are being misunderstood, and are not in fact lying.
Humor strikes me as too unique to ground an argument for deception. I joke all the time and yet people find me to be very trustworthy. This is because they can differentiate between a joke and an assertion and they know that I can too. No one thinks that because I enjoy joking around I am therefore untrustworthy or deceitful.
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No, not really. Deception is intertwined with jokes in a lot of different ways. Sometimes, as with dry humor, you aren't supposed to know going into it that you're hearing a joke. But causing you to make false assumptions is deceptive also.
My wife complains all the time that I never tell her how much I love her. But I don't want to upset her. With that joke, I'm not proposing the scenario of my wife complaining as imaginative. I'm trying to get you to actually believe my wife makes those complaints, which is false. I am stating a falsehood as seriously as I can to convince you it's true. But it gets even more complicated with this example. The "false assumption" is that I do love my wife, but I don't tell her that often enough for her. Then I reveal the "truth" that I don't love my wife and telling that would upset her. So where the setup is supposed to cause you to make a false assumption, you're making an assumption that is basically true. And where the punchline reveals that assumption was erroneous, it does so by stating something that is actually false. It's a real tangled web of deceit, that one. And sure, it's kind of mean, so if my wife didn't find it funny I'd think there might be something morally wrong with it.
So, a baby seal walks into a club. With that "blink and you'll miss it" joke, you know it's a joke going in. The "a character walks into a location" format is extremely common so you know it's a joke from the start. However, I want you to first believe that I'm talking about a night club and then later discover that I am talking about a wooden club. My intent is for you to hold a false belief even though the scenario itself is clearly imaginative.
Two muffins are in an oven baking. One muffin turns to the other and says, "It sure is hot in here!". To which the other muffin replies, "Holy crap! A talking muffin!". Now that joke isn't very deceptive at all. It's clearly presented as an entirely imaginative scenario because most muffins can't talk, and there is no specific belief I'm trying to get you to hold before the punchline. It's funny simply because it's ironic for a talking muffin to be surprised to hear a muffin talk, there isn't really any deception involved in that. As a side note for that joke, it's best told with an actual swear word. It sounds so much like a kid's joke, a good S-Word in there really catches people off guard. You can always change it to "Holy moly!" if you want to teach it to kids. That was the first joke I taught my kid when he was three
.I'll grant you that the deceptive nature of jokes is intended to be temporary, but that doesn't change the fact that if I'm successful, I caused you to hold a false belief for a time. It isn't merely entertaining the idea of a fictional story. If you don't actually believe the pertinent parts, it doesn't work as a joke.
Right, first they believe something that is false, then they realize the truth. I don't know why you're hung up on whether we would call it "deception" or "a lie". Stating something that you know is false with the intention of causing someone else to believe something that is not true sounds like a good definition for "lying" to me, but that works just as well for someone setting up a joke too. Remember, we're talking about whether truth can be grounded in a good god or not. I'm saying that even a good god can cause you to hold false beliefs and be doing something good with it.
Well, for starters, a comedy club removes a lot of the deception, but not all of it. People will know that you're telling a joke no matter how dry the presentation is because telling jokes is what comedy clubs are for. But the comic is still going to cause you to make false assumptions and hold false beliefs. Later, after the punchline you realize you were wrong to believe what you had, but you still held that false belief for a time. Most jokes follow the standard two part format of "set up" then "punchline". The set up is the lie, the punchline is the reveal. Just because you reveal the truth eventually doesn't mean you didn't start out lying.
No, it's because people liked being tricked when they don't have a personal stake in the matter. The natural response to realizing you were tricked into making a false assumption is laughter. People enjoy magic tricks for the same reason. People enjoy being immersed in a good book or movie where they forget that it's just characters on a page or a screen. What people don't like is discovering for themselves later that they were deceived. That's where paranoia comes from. As long as you're the one revealing that you were being deceptive through a joke, people are fine with that because you can be counted on to tell the truth. Just like if you snap at someone out of anger, they're quick to forgive if you're quick to apologize.
In my case, dark dry humor is my specialty. And I know so many jokes that almost everything reminds me of one, so I interject them into conversations like regular anecdotes. People don't generally catch on that it's all a big joke until after I've finished the punchline, so the extra surprise that they've been hearing a joke the whole time amplifies the funny. I tell so many, that sometimes when I'm telling a true story people want to interrupt and ask, "Is this for real?". Oddly enough, they never interrupt my jokes, just the true stories. But people trust me too because I always reveal whether the stories are true or false.
However, while I'm telling a joke, you don't know that your belief is false until I reveal that to you. And if I do it well, I won't give you any reason to be suspicious.
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What is interesting to consider is that nothing is known of that reality beyond our human experience of it. There is no third person perspective in the impersonal sense we usually attribute to objectiveness. We have a set of experiences of diverse kinds of the objective world and we evaluate statements according to it.
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As far as we know, reality and all we know about it does not exist without any minds in it.
I have read a tiny bit on universals and abstract objects. One thing I wonder is "what would reality be without us looking at it?" Would it be anything? We can't even fathom that thought. The properties we ascribe to things like "the blue sky up there", would they exist? Like "blue" and "up"? Even thinking about physical stuff like atoms and how they behave involves our subjective sense experience, even though we have sophisticated equipment. Can reality exist without being known? I'm not sure, but I think not.
And these abstract concepts I mentioned are part of reality. They exist in our minds. Are they more than mere illusions of physical phenomenon? Or are their real, objective existence best explained by an eternal mind?
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If that God creates deceit for only good reasons, like the examples provided so far, then it would be a good God still! In the case of jokes, we get that it's a joke.
Since we know that some things are accurate and some are not, we only need to seek the accuracy. In order for that to exist, there has to be a reliable grounding in reality, something that makes truth reliably knowable, something allowing for the existence of correct thinking as opposed to incorrect thinking. Or as opposed to opinions held indiscriminately. Hence my argument! Building from the bottom up, we should conclude an eternal mind that knows facts accurately and that makes it possible for
us to do the same.
Suspecting deceit without a good reason is exactly that: unreasonable!
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Chriliman
Everything I need to be joyful is right here
Given an eternity past of interactions of some kind, I could possibly see this universe happening, but if immortality is impossible then that would make us a mere fluke in a vast eternal waste of time and energy, which at least for me, makes all this objectively pointless. But I’m sure you’ve heard that from theists time and time again.
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Right. Knowledge of true things is necessarily known. That doesn't give me a reason to think things can't be true that no one is aware of. Knowledge doesn't cause things to be true, things can be true that I am not aware of. So why does anyone need to be aware of something for it to be true?
No, even if we assume there is a good god, he could be using deception for some greater good you're not aware of. That means you do not know some things are accurate and some are not.
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Do you want your kids and grandkids to be happy on Earth even after you're dead? What about their kids, and so on? What if, in some small way, you can help contribute to the flourishing of human life so that it doesn't wipe itself out from some ecological disaster in the far flung future? What if your contributions to human life help your distant descendants from even being enveloped by the Sun, which the Earth is going to do a long, long time from now? What if your contributions even allow human life to advance to the point we can even escape the eventual heat-death of the universe and go on existing into the future infinitely, even though you stopped existing a long, long time ago?
Would your efforts still be pointless just because you don't get to be there in the future to witness it, or was there still a point because you were doing some good for folks you'll never even meet?
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Why not? All that external stuff that we perceive can still exist even if the way we perceive it changes. We already have examples of people who's perceptions are off from the rest of us. There are color blind folks our there. Does their lack of an ability to distinguish between green and red, or our ability to distinguish between them affect the electromagnetic spectrum in any way?
Think of it this way. I know what blue looks like to me. I know that what looks like blue to me corresponds with a specific frequency of the electromagnetic spectrum. If I never experienced what looks like blue to me, that frequency would still exist. Why wouldn't it?
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