Argument from truth

[Sapiens]

I don't have anything to add at the moment, but I just want to say: there are at least two pleasant, intelligent conversations going on. A better thread I haven't seen in a long time. Thumbs up.

I hope I'm part of one of those! Haha

 

[Sapiens]

Is it really a delusion if it works? There may be no objective purpose to a person’s life, but if they devote themselves to a purpose that gives them subjective meaning, giving them the fulfillment they seek, where’s the delusion?

It's made up, imaginary...

 

[gaara4158]

But notice they say it's to know truth for it's own sake. That they are the brave who face the harsh reality. What would they say about you? That your thinking is wishful?

I am a bit of a pragmatist. I’m only interested in Truth insofar as it can help me achieve my various goals. I don’t see any importance in apprehending truths that are of absolutely no consequence. Others are welcome to pursue truth for its own sake, but if they’re unfulfilled by what they uncover they might need to reconsider their priorities.

How do you reconcile your view that truth is what corresponds with reality and that we can trust this phenomenon? Are you advocating self-deception? And claiming it is as or more real even than reality itself?

For all practical purposes, reality is what you’re faced with every single day. The importance of the degree to which that experience correlates with an external referent is defined by the degree to which that external referent affects your experience. In other words, if reality is completely unrelated to our experience, reality simply doesn’t matter.

In this post you seem to be agreeing with me that we should rather believe God exists than not! Am I hallucinating or is this the actual state of reality?

We should believe that life is meaningful, our subjective intuitions matter, and we deserve to be happy. All of that might well be false, but there is no reason to adopt such a perspective. In fact, such a nihilist view is almost indistinguishable from clinical depression. That’s no way to live, even if it’s true.

Not really. The art speaks of the artist, just as the engine speaks of the engineer.

But we don’t have design in nature, only the appearance of design. Just as the appearance of art does not necessitate an artist (think sunsets, mountains, etc.), the appearance of design does not necessitate a designer.

 

[Sapiens]

Ahh, but that's not necessarily true. What if my "what ifs" come true? Human civilization goes on into the future infinitely, but you are dust in the wind. If your actions helped to guide human society in the direction of surviving and thriving and being happy, then your actions are not inconsequential. Hows the saying go... "I didn't do it alone, but I like to think they couldn't have done it without me".

Well, I will be dust in the wind anyways if naturalism is true. For me, it doesn't matter.

Let's consider your hypothetical scenario, while keeping in mind it is just that for no evidence is available for it. You see, I believe humanity is desperately wicked. History and personal experience attest to that. The only way to remedy this is by a change of nature, and that is what God will do. Moreover, every individual will certainly die, in your scenario. The only way to live a "meaningful" life is to be temporarily happy and somehow contribute to the wellbeing of others present or future. It still sucks. I don't want to die! It is true I know now that my actions will matter to others but once I'm gone I won't care. No reward of punishment for my good or bad lifestyle. In any case, all of this is assuming objective purpose and morality (to be happy, for humanity to survive, to do good to others) which isn't warranted for by naturalism.

 

[gaara4158]

It's made up, imaginary...

So? What difference does it make if it provides you the same fulfillment?

 

[holo]

You see, I believe humanity is desperately wicked. History and personal experience attest to that.

There's that should again, isn't it? The world should be different, you say. Based on what?

What if you turn it on its head and imagine that the universe is completely purposeless and that human life has no objective meaning. Earth is a tiny planet that will eventually be swallowed by the Sun and everything will be gone. Yet in this cold and empty universe, there are people full of love and meaning and compassion. I mean, how wonderful is that? There's no point or plan to any of this, but here we are, making art, making love, making friends. We're nothing but animals, but still we've gotten extreme poverty to a record low, there are fewer people dying in wars, we live longer and healthier than ever before. Yes, there is war and sickness. And there are millions of people who give their lives to stop wars, trying to make amends, feeding the hungry and healing the sick.

If your idea is that Earth should be heaven, no wonder you're disappointed. But if you take the opposite perspective, the one without a grand plan and a mysterious God, the world starts looking like a pretty amazing place. What could be better than creating meaning in a meaningless universe?

Moreover, every individual will certainly die, in your scenario. The only way to live a "meaningful" life is to be temporarily happy and somehow contribute to the wellbeing of others present or future. It still sucks.

I think it's glorious. What a wonderful thing to pursue happiness for yourself and others in the face of eventual extintion!

It is true I know now that my actions will matter to others but once I'm gone I won't care.

The good you do creates ripples that will last as long as there are people. You won't care when you're gone, but future generations will. Just like we today care about and appreciate what people like Martin Luther King did, even if it doesn't matter to him anymore.

No reward of punishment for my good or bad lifestyle.

That's when you know you have good morals, though, when you do something because it's right and not to get a reward.

 

[gaara4158]

Well, It wouldn't be more than the product of our imagination, in a sense. I'm glad we agree it's a subjective experience. Illusory and hallucinatory in the sense that there is no intended purpose for our minds to align with. No particular way of thinking is right. We have an experience, and that's it. If we accept it's objectively meaningless, as you do, then it is nothing more than a subjective experience. Reality then is only whatever we conceive of it, not necessarily what we perceive. But if it is what we perceive and conceive, then an explanation for that is required. I think more plausible it is what we think it is. It's very counterintuitive to deny that.

The “intended purpose” for our minds to align with would be the reality by which our biological life system is produced and preserved. It wouldn’t be a literal, anthropomorphic designer causing it to be that way, but rather natural evolutionary processes eventually producing a species with the ability to figure out what’s going on and use that to aid in survival. It would be more bizarre on naturalism to find ourselves in the matrix-like delusion you suggest than it would on theism; at least on theism we’d have an obvious suspect explaining why our experience is totally disconnected from reality.

But it should make you want it to be true and thus open to reasons to believe so.

Moreover, I think the very counterintuitiveness of naturalism is a big big red flag. It has you deny everything fundamental about life, like ethics and truth. Without some objective standard for either, we are left with naturalism. And thus, you should do and believe whatever you want just because you want it. That's what makes me reject naturalism wholeheartedly and even feel disgust for it. I find it hard to think that I ever believed it.

It has you deny that life has any objective meaning or value as well. These are the 3 strongest reasons for which I reject naturalism.

Naturalism doesn’t require you to drop all notions of morality, truth, and meaning. It just requires you to view and justify them in ways different from the ways they’re often justified on theism. It’s been my endeavor in this thread to explain how truth and meaning are perfectly serviceable concepts on a naturalistic worldview when evaluated in terms of their utility, and the same goes for morality. Reality doesn’t owe you meaning or comfort, but that doesn’t mean you can’t have them.

 

[Sapiens]

My point is, your idea of God is not necessary in order for truth to exist.

I understand it's your point, but am I supposed to just take your word for it? Why is not necessary? How do you explain the objectivity of truth without a supreme and transcendent mind?

 

[holo]

Reality doesn’t owe you meaning or comfort, but that doesn’t mean you can’t have them.

This is the wisest thing I've read in a while.

 

[Tinker Grey]

I hope I'm part of one of those! Haha

Sure.

 

[Moral Orel]

Well, I will be dust in the wind anyways if naturalism is true. For me, it doesn't matter.

Let's consider your hypothetical scenario, while keeping in mind it is just that for no evidence is available for it. You see, I believe humanity is desperately wicked. History and personal experience attest to that. The only way to remedy this is by a change of nature, and that is what God will do. Moreover, every individual will certainly die, in your scenario. The only way to live a "meaningful" life is to be temporarily happy and somehow contribute to the wellbeing of others present or future. It still sucks. I don't want to die! It is true I know now that my actions will matter to others but once I'm gone I won't care. No reward of punishment for my good or bad lifestyle. In any case, all of this is assuming objective purpose and morality (to be happy, for humanity to survive, to do good to others) which isn't warranted for by naturalism.

I don't want to sound rude, but I have to say this is kind of selfish, isn't it? Life isn't meaningful unless you're getting rewarded for making other folks' lives better? Isn't making the lives of others better supposed to be its own reward?

Don't think I'm being judgy. I'm super-selfish. My life is all about making me happy, it only happens to be the case that making some other folks happy makes me happy too... sometimes.

 

[Moral Orel]

Fair enough. The humor/joke topic is interesting enough to keep me engaged.

It's fun right? I could keep posting random kinds of jokes to pick apart. Here's my favorite Demetri Martin bit:

How come, when you're making love, it's okay to say, "Yes!" or "Yeah!" or "Uh-huh!" but it's not okay to say, "Yep"? No deception there. Just pointing out something that everyone knows, but never thinks about.

It is relative but I think my point is easy to understand. Jokes are temporary deception in the way of seconds.

Well, I think that pointing out that jokes use deception for good is sufficient for us to reanalyze deception and figure out what the missing link is that makes deception evil when it's evil. Is there a reason to think some amount of time is really the important factor in that?

Sure... I was more asking about the missing link of humor. If deception & surprise aren't sufficient to account for the essence of humor, then what is it?

I think surprise is sufficient to explain the humor of a joke. Like the dark jokes, there's nothing clever about them. You're lulled into a false sense of security that you aren't going to hear something shocking, then you do. I don't think humor requires one sort of thing to have at it's essence.

Hahaha! I have similar stories, although I don't fully agree with your old Tosh quote that anything can be funny or that there can be no inappropriate jokes. I do sometimes receive the response, "That's not funny," or "All jokes have some truth to them," etc. As with your co-workers response, people who respond that way to a risky joke become an object of humor themselves, which is why it is fun to push the envelope just a little bit to draw people into that awkward space. But I've lost friends that way too so I am more careful about it these days.

I really didn't want to make folks laugh at her or make her feel uncomfortable. I tried my little heart out to convince her to let it go. I just want to make people laugh when I tell a joke. She didn't enjoy that at all, and I'm sure that being embarrassed about being so publicly affected only magnified the disgust she felt about the joke itself. I have a lot of jokes that most decent folk don't want to hear, the sort of jokes that are on subjects most decent folk would find inappropriate. What I've found is that people can be desensitized really easily. Just make your jokes ramp up on the offensiveness scale gradually, and people who were scarred by things as children can learn to laugh at those things too.

When you really think about offensiveness and humor, you realize how ridiculous it is to be offended by anything. Most people are offended by something and that something is entirely subjective. Even the degree that people feel the offense is subjective. A black guy hearing the N-word might be mildly irritated, whereas an elderly white woman hearing "Damn" in a movie theatre might faint. Nothing is objectively offensive, so whatever offends one person isn't any more special than the thing that offends the next person. I think my "nothing offends me" outlook actually makes me more sensitive to the emotions of others than folks who think that there are things you would be correct to be offended about because that means some folks are incorrect to be offended at their things. No one is right, they're all being irrational, and everyone should be polite enough to cater to those irrational feelings to a large extent.

 

[Sapiens]

Why? If there is no meaning then there is no real "should". That doesn't mean we all don't have this intuition of should/ought, it just means that "should" doesn't really exist. There is no should. There is the past, which is gone. There is the now, which is what it is. And there's the future, which is "can be." Should is nothing, it's an idea, a wish.

I like this take on it:

"Should" is the way things should be. But I meant it in the sense "just do whatever you want, it doesn't matter anyways what you do, might as well want what you do."

Once you realize the constraints of reality and morality are illusory, nothing stops you from living and seeing life as whatever you please.

 

[Sapiens]

True, it won't be objective, but that can be seen as a beautiful thing rather than a problem. If there is some objective purpose, it's a real shame it's hidden from us. We all have some grand purpose, but for the life of us we can't figure out what it is and even start wars over it. That's just tragic IMO.

The beauty and wonderful potential is that there isn't some objective, external purpose to our existence. We aren't here for any particular "reason", we're just a product of all there is. Of all possible outcomes, of all possible universes, of all possible combinations of egg and sperm and history and accident, here we are. I think that's awesome.

I honestly don't see how you and the others see that as beautiful and much less as awesome. And I've heard that before, from my stepmother whom I respect a lot. I find it deeply saddening. I would feel horrible to realise my existence has no point to it. I don't even know how you can make one up for yourself after that realisation.

I don't see why you say it's hidden. I know what my purpose is. I've even shared it in this thread. To love our neighbor as ourselves should be at least the one we deduce, and to love our creator should be the other. That some disagree on what it is and to say there is none are two very distinct things. Disagreement does not prove one party isn't right.

I wonder why you find it tragic, after all you just said. There is no purpose to deviate from. Human life has no more value than that of a rock or a mosquito.

 

[Sapiens]

True, it won't be objective, but that can be seen as a beautiful thing rather than a problem. If there is some objective purpose, it's a real shame it's hidden from us. We all have some grand purpose, but for the life of us we can't figure out what it is and even start wars over it. That's just tragic IMO.

The beauty and wonderful potential is that there isn't some objective, external purpose to our existence. We aren't here for any particular "reason", we're just a product of all there is. Of all possible outcomes, of all possible universes, of all possible combinations of egg and sperm and history and accident, here we are. I think that's awesome.

Moreover, why couldn't we do that with reality as a whole? Is there really a right way to see things? My answer thus far has been no and it continues to be. If there is no "ought", then there is no truth. Just believe whatever you believe. No point in correcting anything or in seeking a better point of view. There really is none.

 

[gaara4158]

I honestly don't see how you and the others see that as beautiful and much less as awesome. And I've heard that before, from my stepmother whom I respect a lot. I find it deeply saddening. I would feel horrible to realise my existence has no point to it. I don't even know how you can make one up for yourself after that realisation.

I don't see why you say it's hidden. I know what my purpose is. I've even shared it in this thread. To love our neighbor as ourselves should be at least the one we deduce, and to love our creator should be the other. That some disagree on what it is and to say there is none are two very distinct things. Disagreement does not prove one party isn't right.

I wonder why you find it tragic, after all you just said. There is no purpose to deviate from. Human life has no more value than that of a rock or a mosquito.

I wonder if you feel the same way about your role in society. Would you rather have a job assigned to you from birth, or have the freedom to seek out employment that suits your lifestyle? Would you rather have your major in college chosen for you, or have the freedom to elect a major that suits your interests? Would you rather have a religion imposed upon you from birth, or have the freedom to decide which one, if any, resonates with you?

What is it about freedom when it comes to meaning and purpose that discourages you so?

 

[Sapiens]

When you believed it, did you freely pick and choose what to believe? Did you believe stuff just because you wanted to?

I think the burden of proof is on those who claim life does have an objective meaning and value. The main reason I reject that idea is because nobody agrees on what that meaning even is - there's supposedly a grand purpose behind it all, but for some reason it's not apparent what it is. If it exists, why is it so darn hard to figure it out?

No of course I didn't. But then again, I didn't realize these implications followed from my position. Had I realized it sooner, I would've rejected it on grounds of incoherency, and dare I say downright foolishness. One does not wish reality into existence.

How many do you need to agree to believe something? 60%? 75%? 90%? 100%?

What if 1% only knows it. Is it less real? If not, you should look at which worldview makes the most sense. I personally have 2 criterion: 1. Grounded in reality as can be evidenced by research with all means available. 2. Internally consistent. If there is a correct way to view reality, then we should seek that way. To me seeking what is good and what is true are 2 fundamental purposes of life.

That we cannot properly discern and attain the 2 is evidence we have a problem. A situation which Christianity addresses and for which it provides the solution. Sin and salvation. We are crazy and evil. (Essentially) haha

Thank God for Jesus!

Like I said also, caring for our neighbor because they are human like us, and we hold ourselves to have value and deserve or want certain things. Also, there is evidence for a divine and supreme creator. Obviously, this very thread is about this. We should seek to know him and his will. Since all depends on it.

 

[Sapiens]

I am a bit of a pragmatist. I’m only interested in Truth insofar as it can help me achieve my various goals. I don’t see any importance in apprehending truths that are of absolutely no consequence. Others are welcome to pursue truth for its own sake, but if they’re unfulfilled by what they uncover they might need to reconsider their priorities.


For all practical purposes, reality is what you’re faced with every single day. The importance of the degree to which that experience correlates with an external referent is defined by the degree to which that external referent affects your experience. In other words, if reality is completely unrelated to our experience, reality simply doesn’t matter.


We should believe that life is meaningful, our subjective intuitions matter, and we deserve to be happy. All of that might well be false, but there is no reason to adopt such a perspective. In fact, such a nihilist view is almost indistinguishable from clinical depression. That’s no way to live, even if it’s true.


But we don’t have design in nature, only the appearance of design. Just as the appearance of art does not necessitate an artist (think sunsets, mountains, etc.), the appearance of design does not necessitate a designer.

Your attitude vis-à-vis truth is intriguing. Not crazy, but intriguing. I agree that counterproductive truths have no interest to be sought after. But do you simply ignore the facts you don't like? My perspective is to find whatever there really is "out there". To get the right view of the world and then live according to it.

To your second paragraph I would respond... Or that view about reality is mistaken. I wholeheartedly agree with your 3rd paragraph. Well said btw. I hadn't seen it like that but it's true. I had a friend that was a nihilist. He wasn't very happy... And still isn't. It makes me sad.

How do you know it's only an appearance? How do you discard its reality?

 

[Sapiens]

So? What difference does it make if it provides you the same fulfillment?

Well this is a thread about truth. So it matters in the sense that it is grounded in your imagination and not in reality. Moreover, I don't even see how it is possible to make up a purpose after realizing there really isn't one. How do you personally do it? Before becoming a Christian, I went through a deep depression and honestly thought I had no objective purpose (that I knew of anyways). I was thinking about suicide. But there was still this sense within telling me I had real value and that life somehow is worth living. Quite weird actually. I was horribly unhappy. At any rate, there was a clash between what I thought I believed (naturalism/nihilism) and what I actually believed (purpose/hope). I think one has to live inconsistently to believe as you do.

 

[Sapiens]

So? What difference does it make if it provides you the same fulfillment?

It's so counterintuitive to say life is objectively purposeless and that we have no objective value that right there we should reject any worldview embracing this.

If we recognize there is objective purpose, we only need to figure it out then.