uncaused causes

KCfromNC · Jul 27, 2012

JonF said:
I'm not talking about scientific laws or theories, i'm talking about the fundamental assumptions of science. You claim science doesn't have fundamental assumptions. Here are a few. If they aren't assumptions as you claim justify them with science.
1) The world is rational
2) The world is consistent
3) The world is uniform
4) There exist unifying principles that explain phenomena (also called natural laws)
5) Human observations can be accurate
6) Causality holds

Considering that science rejects several of these so called fundamental assumptions, I question how fundamental they are.

KCfromNC · Jul 27, 2012

JonF said:
You are rejecting my worldview based on it's first principles. Your worldview is composed of first principles just like mine, which are unproved concepts.

Most likely, your assumptions are a superset of his. That is, you probably accept all of the basic stuff he does - for example the list of alleged assumptions of science - and then throw god on top of the mix. So you can pretend that everyone is on the same basis, but if certain types of belief require more complex unjustified assumptions than others, there's certainly a way to distinguish between the two.

It means that science can't answer the question of God existence. Science can make no comment at all on if or if not God exist.

This is just evidence that God is a poorly designed and thought out concept. Science can't comment because no one really knows what they actually mean when they use the word. It is intentionally fuzzy and confusing so it can't be disproved.

sandwiches · Jul 27, 2012

JonF said:
You are choosing to ignore everything i've said about beliefs in God being a priori, synthetic, first principles. This is a misrepresentation of my position.

Why do you believe any first principle?

These are the two only assumption anyone and everyone uses:
My senses are trustworthy
My reasoning is sound

So, how did you reason or sense God existence?

Dave Ellis · Jul 27, 2012

sandwiches said:
These are the two only assumption anyone and everyone uses:
My senses are trustworthy
My reasoning is sound

So, how did you reason or sense God existence?

I don't even assume those.

1. Senses can be easily fooled
2. If you assume your reasoning is sound, then you close your mind to the possibility you made a mistake somewhere. You should always be looking for flaws in even your own reasoning.

sandwiches · Jul 30, 2012

Dave Ellis said:
I don't even assume those.

1. Senses can be easily fooled
2. If you assume your reasoning is sound, then you close your mind to the possibility you made a mistake somewhere. You should always be looking for flaws in even your own reasoning.

You must be able to trust your reasoning and senses at some point or you won't ever be able to assume you understand anything, unless you feel you know and understand nothing.

Dave Ellis · Jul 30, 2012

sandwiches said:
You must be able to trust your reasoning and senses at some point or you won't ever be able to assume you understand anything, unless you feel you know and understand nothing.

Oh, absolutely. I'm not saying I don't trust my senses....

However the whole point of peer review is to get other people to make sure I haven't misjudged anything.

Your senses can mislead you sometimes, that's all I was getting at.

sandwiches · Jul 30, 2012

Dave Ellis said:
Oh, absolutely. I'm not saying I don't trust my senses....

However the whole point of peer review is to get other people to make sure I haven't misjudged anything.

Your senses can mislead you sometimes, that's all I was getting at.

Of course they can. But my point is that our only two most basic beliefs is that at some point, we can trust our reasoning and our senses. This applies to atheists and theists alike.

Eudaimonist · Jul 30, 2012

sandwiches said:
But my point is that our only two most basic beliefs is that at some point, we can trust our reasoning and our senses. This applies to atheists and theists alike.

Agreed.

It's a bit like math. I might make mistakes doing math, as I did while doing math homework as a child, but I don't doubt that if I did the math correctly, I would get the appropriate answer.

I have no reason to doubt that my senses operate according to the nature of my sensory organs and neural processing, and I have no reason to doubt that I can reason well in principle. These are fairly "axiomatic" ideas in that they usually form the foundation for reasoning, although my confidence in them is supported by life experience.

I'd also add the self-evident idea that "something exists". If nothing existed, philosophical questions wouldn't exist either.

I might even add the self-evident idea that I am a human individual living a human life. I realize that people can suggest that we're living in the Matrix, or suggest that solipsism is true, or whatever else, it hardly seems necessary to "prove" something like this when every day of our lives contributes to that obvious conclusion.

eudaimonia,

Mark

Received · Jul 30, 2012

The external world and trusting our reason might be self-evident.

But it's a fact that considerations on whether self-evident things are trustworthy isn't necessarily a leap in reason has been discussed throughout the history of philosophy as one hell of a problem. And if self-evident things are related to sense experience, theists can make the same claim: my senses are trustworthy, but you, friend atheist, haven't had the same experiences I have.

Eudaimonist · Jul 30, 2012

Received said:
But it's a fact that considerations on whether self-evident things are trustworthy isn't necessarily a leap in reason has been discussed throughout the history of philosophy as one hell of a problem.

I think that far too much has been made of that problem. Sure, such ideas can be challenged, but they should be challenged by far more than "what ifs" in order to be recognized as having weight. The Matrix only poses a serious difficulty if we had reason to believe that it actually existed. Otherwise, any concerns about the Matrix are intellectual masturbation.

And if self-evident things are related to sense experience, theists can make the same claim: my senses are trustworthy, but you, friend atheist, haven't had the same experiences I have.

They may make that claim, but how much weight would it have? Very little unless they can back up those experiences with a little more than their say-so.

eudaimonia,

Mark

Received · Jul 30, 2012

Eudaimonist said:
I think that far too much has been made of that problem. Sure, such ideas can be challenged, but they should be challenged by far more than "what ifs" in order to be recognized as having weight. The Matrix only poses a serious difficulty if we had reason to believe that it actually existed. Otherwise, any concerns about the Matrix are intellectual masturbation.

To be fair, the problem of the "leap" to trusting out senses, believing in other people and an external world, etc., isn't quite the same as the Matrix, given that the Matrix posits a reason for why these things are illusory, and so opens up a burden of proof on the person who would otherwise be skeptically claiming that there is no justification for assuming our senses (and other things), are valid.

But I agree that too much has been made of the problem. Unlike you, however, I think it's a leap in our reasoning to assume things like an external world, etc., but I'm fine making the leap for pragmatic reasons. I think if you look deep enough, pragmatism is the basis of a lot of our assumptions, which are converted to premises we use for arguments. That's fine.

They may make that claim, but how much weight would it have? Very little unless they can back up those experiences with a little more than their say-so.

Likewise with assuming the external world exists, other people exist, etc. Actually, an even better analogy, I think, is with color. Consider red. We might claim that it's entirely based in rods and cones in our brains interacting with light patterns and matter "out there." But that's the physical stuff, not the phenomenological experience of red. I can never, ever know that what I experience as red is the exact same thing that you likewise label as red. Likewise with religious experience: you can't "know" what I experience is God, much in the same way I can't know that what you experience as red is in fact what I call red.

Eudaimonist · Jul 30, 2012

Received said:
To be fair, the problem of the "leap" to trusting out senses, believing in other people and an external world, etc., isn't quite the same as the Matrix, given that the Matrix posits a reason for why these things are illusory, and so opens up a burden of proof on the person who would otherwise be skeptically claiming that there is no justification for assuming our senses (and other things), are valid.

Nah, it's exactly the same, because until we have a good reason (whether the Matrix or anything else) to distrust our senses, the default IMJ is to trust our senses. This isn't a "leap". It's our starting point. It's the only starting point we truly have, and therefore the only place to "leap" from, despite the rationalistic impulse to strive for some human-neutral "presuppositions". I pretty much blame rationalism for creating the whole fake "problem" of justifying trust in our senses in a way that doesn't involve our senses. This leads to many needless dead-ends in philosophy.

Consider red. We might claim that it's entirely based in rods and cones in our brains interacting with light patterns and matter "out there." But that's the physical stuff, not the phenomenological experience of red.

Agreed, but we are straying from the issue. I'm not talking about knowledge of what other people experience, which has a whole different set of challenges. The questions of trusting one's senses or believing in the existence of an external world are based on one's own life experience.

So, whatever color other people (such as color blind people) may experience when looking at a ripe Red Delicious apple, one has an immediate perception of that redness, and of the apple as an apple.

Can one be fooled? Sure. But one's awareness and developing cognitive context based on life experience should be anyone's proper starting point. We can sharpen our understanding by removing accidental contradictions with Socratic self-examination, but it would be a mistake to start off by doubting that one's senses or reasoning skills perform any useful function at all. That kind of doubt is empty unless it is matched with very good reasons for that doubt.

eudaimonia,

Mark

Received · Jul 30, 2012

You're right, that seems to be straying.

The question I have, I guess, is: what justifies you in saying that trusting our senses is default? That is, if it's reasonable to trust our senses, you should have an argument from premises to support trusting out senses. Saying you don't, or that it's simply practical to do so, opens up all sorts of epistemological possibilities for religious people, among others, to make their claims of theism equally valid.

Tinker Grey · Jul 30, 2012

Inductive reasoning doesn't require premises, I think. I've been toying with the idea that all of our axioms and foundational beliefs are not, in fact, properly basic, assuming I'm using Craig and Plantinga's terminology correctly.

Experience is the input to our inductive mental machine. We conclude from experience inductively even things as apparently axiomatic as "1 + 1 = 2".

Anything we've learned, we've learned through our senses. We modify our behavior patterns and thought processes so that we get the results we expect/desire.

By the time we get to the point where we can engage in a conversation such as this, our experiences and our processing of those experiences have already created our "axioms".

Inductive logic, I think, has been unfairly considered the "red-headed" step-sibling of deductive logic. But if I am right, deductive logic be used only after our inductive machine has produced axioms to use a premises. Neither is inherently better than the other and each has there place. The quality of the reasoning processes is determined by results.

sandwiches · Jul 30, 2012

Received said:
The external world and trusting our reason might be self-evident.

But it's a fact that considerations on whether self-evident things are trustworthy isn't necessarily a leap in reason has been discussed throughout the history of philosophy as one hell of a problem. And if self-evident things are related to sense experience, theists can make the same claim: my senses are trustworthy, but you, friend atheist, haven't had the same experiences I have.

Many theists do in fact make that exact claim. So? Isn't an atheist justified for not believing what he cannot reason and he hasn't experienced? After all, in no other case do we take people's alleged personal experiences at face value. In fact, even among theists they don't take other theists personal experiences without evidence unless it is compatible with what they already believe.

Eudaimonist · Jul 30, 2012

Received said:
The question I have, I guess, is: what justifies you in saying that trusting our senses is default?

Life experience.

What other justification is required? Is one able to use one's senses to justify one's senses, or is one forbidden from doing so? I object to this rationalistic foundationalism, where one seems to be required to adopt an entirely nonhuman perspective in order to justify a human perspective. Instead, we should accept that we are human beings developing an organic human perspective, something that develops since we are little children just starting to be aware of the world of human experience. That is our starting point. We develop from there. Anything else is entirely artificial and likely to end up in pointless circularity.

That is, if it's reasonable to trust our senses, you should have an argument from premises to support trusting out senses.

No, that's entirely the wrong approach, in my view. The senses are necessarily part of our "premises", which is to say our epistemological foundation.

Saying you don't, or that it's simply practical to do so, opens up all sorts of epistemological possibilities for religious people, among others, to make their claims of theism equally valid.

I realize that it might seem that way, but I don't agree. Not every view is equally sensible and coherent. There is a big difference between, on the one hand, accepting that one is aware of some external reality and, on the other hand, specifically concluding that that reality contains divine beings.

I realize that some people might have to go through a "theistic phase" to see that their claims of theism aren't equally valid. They might never leave that phase either. However, that doesn't mean that their claims are equally valid, but only that they had arrived at the wrong personal truths along the way.

eudaimonia,

Mark

sandwiches · Jul 30, 2012

Received said:
You're right, that seems to be straying.

The question I have, I guess, is: what justifies you in saying that trusting our senses is default? That is, if it's reasonable to trust our senses, you should have an argument from premises to support trusting out senses. Saying you don't, or that it's simply practical to do so, opens up all sorts of epistemological possibilities for religious people, among others, to make their claims of theism equally valid.

It isn't only practical, pragmatic, and generally a good idea to trust your senses. It is validated and justified during the vast majority of what we perceive to be our lives for the vast majority of us and is confirmed through our experiences with others who, for the most part, seem to experience and reason like ourselves.

We can make any claims we want. Whether we can make claims that are meaningful to anyone else is another matter entirely. It is no surprise that the claims we value the most are those we can justify to others. After all, as they say "actions speak louder than words."

Received · Jul 30, 2012

Mark, saying "Life experience" means assuming the very senses ("experience" here being reducible to senses) we're putting into question.

sandwiches, I agree completely that it's a good idea to trust our senses. I don't think what makes something good, at least in this case, makes it true. Put differently, "good" implies practicality, not veracity. Also, saying it is validated by what we perceive to be our lives appears to beg the question by using the very perception (senses) that I'm questioning.

I know this question is a big pain in the ass.

sandwiches · Jul 30, 2012

Received said:
Mark, saying "Life experience" means assuming the very senses ("experience" here being reducible to senses) we're putting into question.

sandwiches, I agree completely that it's a good idea to trust our senses. I don't think what makes something good, at least in this case, makes it true. Put differently, "good" implies practicality, not veracity. Also, saying it is validated by what we perceive to be our lives appears to beg the question by using the very perception (senses) that I'm questioning.

I know this question is a big pain in the ass.

It makes it true as far as we "can/have been able to" determine. It's not as big a problem as some would like to think it is, not in any real, every-day sense anyway. this reminds me of the alleged problem of whether things are something other than what we perceive them to be. For instance, that there is a "cup itself" beyond the "cup" we perceive. I honestly see it as a meaningless problem and/or question.

sandwiches · Jul 30, 2012

Received said:
Also, saying it is validated by what we perceive to be our lives appears to beg the question by using the very perception (senses) that I'm questioning.

I chose the phrasing very deliberately, as you might imagine, but all we have is out senses and our reasoning. We have our method of input and our processing unit. So, our lives are implicitly what we perceive and reason to be our lives in the same way a car is implicitly what we perceive and reason to be a car.

However, I wanted to make sure that there were no misunderstandings or illusions that our universe is nothing more than what we perceive and understand it to be. However, for EVERY AND ALL intents and purposes for us, that is all it is, indeed.

uncaused causes

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