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Well sure, all kinds of outlandish possibilities could be verifiable. All kinds of completely mundane possibilities could be unverifiable. That doesn’t tell us anything about how likely they are to be true. You have to do more work to get there.
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
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.
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.Right, and I’d say it’s possible to do so, but we can’t expect a verifiable answer, unless we assume a mind that encompasses all time.
What do you mean by negative position?
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.
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.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?
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.
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.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.
That's fine, I don't want our discussion to get so broad that we're writing dissertations either.
I've been accused many times of anthropomorphizing God by asking wrong questions before. How do I know when I should think of God in terms of a person and when I should think in some other terms?
I don't know if it's the ads or what. But lately when people link to posts, my browser doesn't point to the right one. Can you quote yourself at me so I can see exactly what you're talking about?
I see suspicious and trustworthy as opposite poles on a spectrum. So maybe we're just conceptualizing these things differently.
My intent is to cause you to believe something that is false, just like a lie.
Now further, my intent is to bring about some good, namely laughter. So you don't have to call it a deception or a lie if you don't want to. All that matters is that causing someone to believe something that is false can be good, and you can call it what you want. But it does keep us from grounding truth in even a good god. If causing someone to believe something that is false temporarily isn't inherently evil, then a good god can screw up your ability to know at least some true things as long as it brings about some good, and you don't have to know what that good is or what those untrue things are until after you're dead.
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.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.
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.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.
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.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.
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.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.
No, he's saying that knowledge doesn't exist without a mind. See my penny analogy at the beginning of the thread. There's no reason to think that it was not true that there was a penny under my desk just because I was unaware of it. You're conflating "I know this to be true" with "This is true" and they aren't the same thing.
No, he's saying that knowledge doesn't exist without a mind. See my penny analogy at the beginning of the thread. There's no reason to think that it was not true that there was a penny under my desk just because I was unaware of it. You're conflating "I know this to be true" with "This is true" and they aren't the same thing.
It's a question of perspective. If, as I allowed myself to define earlier, truth is an attribute of statements made about reality, then reality is just reality. It is. There is no truth until a statement is made about that reality. No minds are required for reality; truth is an assessment of statements.
It is tricky. It is very tempting--and indeed, idiomatic--to say "it is true that there is a rock there and it is true whether I say it or not." Yes, but you said it. It has been said. If there things about which I know nothing, such that about which I can say nothing, then truth doesn't exist or is undefined.
ETA: Or, what @gaara4158 said.
Because without a mind we can’t say reality exists, especially reality prior to our own minds.
So you’re either stuck insisting reality exists apart from all minds with no way to verify that statement(bc you’d have to take away all minds) or insisting reality exists because of an eternal mind.
Of course we can’t say reality exists without a mind. It requires a mind to say anything. That doesn’t mean it takes a mind for there to be anything.
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.But that's a spectrum of the possibility that god is evil, not a spectrum of how evil that god is. Maybe that god is somewhere in between pure good and pure evil. You aren't referring to a spectrum where the more evil that god is the more likely he is to be deceitful.
First of all, what are you considering a "strong possibility" to be? Is 50/50 "strong"? And second, how is that a strange idea? Trusting everything anyone tells you until evidence is presented to the contrary sounds like gullibility to me.
Are you of the mind that causing someone to believe something that is false is always bad? Because I would disagree. Jokes are a kind of deceit. Are they bad? Because if deceit isn't always wrong, then a good god can cause you to believe false things too.
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.
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?Truth is necessarily known.
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.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.
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?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.
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?Can reality exist without being known? I'm not sure, but I think not.
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?
Is objective pointlessness somehow less likely to be true than a grand objective meaning?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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