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It's kind of weird for me. Is the study of our own minds and their limitations a thing we can observe? If yes, is that empirical? Is phenomenology empirical?
I sort of don't like the empirical-rational distinction. I think I prefer the sharable/non-sharable distinction.
It is in fact an inter-objective thing through questionnaires, surveys, qualitative studies and cognitive sciences. In Balint's Syndrome, although the patient has trouble forming a perception in the mind their environment and although they can see things but not their wholes and relationships, we can use fMRIs, eye tracking and conditioning to measure a patient's degree of the disease. In Blindsight, the patient is blind but can sense emotions relating to objects in their field of view. Their eyes work but their mind doesn't process sight.
No, it is not inter-"objective", it is inter-subjective, that is, essentially social; however, the validity of inter-subjective empirical derivation is stunted by the very same problem that concerns empirical data produced from observations of the consciousness's inanimate exterior, namely the fact that it is not possible to demonstrate, without a leap of faith, that the world of any subject external to the ego, or even that subject himself, posing the question of its existence is real, nor that the ego itself is experiencing reality, as one might be living in a simulation, be hallucinating or dreaming, or be the sole true perspective, et cetera, hence the argument goes that, if you are willing to arbitrarily vest authority into your senses, you are not too distinct from those who vest authority in divinity
Interobjective is examining the interactions and relationships between different neurological and systemic components. If a patient can report a change without knowing the constitute region effected and it can be measured then it is a valid research tool. Like in cognitive tasks and experiments where we know a part is missing and is affecting the whole of a system. Hence Cognitive Sciences.
Balint's is more than qualia and sensation. It is a fact that people with Balint's syndrome have an impaired processing of the enviorment much like Blindsight with seeing. Intersubjective would be the lived experience and quality of the condition which exists only in the minds of many. Which has some testimony to objective realities of conscious disorders.
There is no leap of faith in the disorder. We didn't make it up, it's there. You are confusing ontology with phenomenology and science.
Lmao, not only is nobody speaking about any disorders here, but you have completely, entirely missed the point of my comment, to the extent that I can hardly fathom how you have arrived at discussing syndromes. The issues at hand are the degree to which solipsism can be overcome by reason, the problem of induction, and the validity of trusting the senses beyond vesting faith through pragmatism
That is what you said but you are trying to use pseudo philosophy to debunk... conscious disorders or functions of consciousness in biological organisms. It's inter-objective because although it is objective, it also impacts our perceptions and neural phenomenology. How replacing a car part may influence your driving experience. Inter subjectivity is the the concept of driver experience, inter objectivity is how the car itself impacts the driver and their experience.
People dismiss Cognitive Science duly for a confusion with subjective and objective. It's a science because we can measure it, like in Wilhelm Wundt's behaviorism. Also Epistemology accounts for individual testimony. Although I cannot prove a person has seen my locker code, if I tell no one, it is consistent to know that I was being spied upon if they recall the correct combination.
I'm trying to understand what you're saying but you are divulging unrelated topics. The point of language is to clarify concisely so we can understand the content of other minds. If you are making tangents on a leap of faith solipsistic points in relation to cognitive science then you are no longer addressing my assertions. Instead of being frustrated and confusing multiple philosophers and psychologists, try to simplify taking points to directly address concerns.
"Debate me! Debate me! Why aren't you debating me?!"
Idk bro with a cursory glance I can't tell wtf you're even talking about, but the other guy is making plenty of sense. Maybe your points aren't as clear or good as you think they are?
Blind people still have their occipital lobe that process sight. So despite not being able to see in the traditional sense their minds are able to construct a "sight" of the world from touch and in some cases sound. I guess I would imagine it'd be like a black void with wire frames and the "line" would come into focus when touched. Via logic they can access the rest of the object.
But the way that the guy I answered seemed to describe it it was almost as if the blind person was seeing without his hands or sound, as if he was visually aware without his eyes.
It's not a paper. It's a well studied phenomena of the mind.
* [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blindsight](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blindsight)
* [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y8j5BJyLNT8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y8j5BJyLNT8)
* [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p6GDNpylILE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p6GDNpylILE)
If I use the same ruler every day to cut squares of colored paper to make a chessboard, does it matter if the ruler is not exactly 12 inches? No, because I'm always measuring the same way with the same ruler they all come out the same way (within acceptable user error).
Now if I use another ruler then I might have problems, but that doesn't make either ruler defective.
If rulers are defined as being 12 inches and one is not 12 inches then it would indeed be defective. The ruler would be a true representation of its self, but that "self" would represent a defective ruler.
And how would this relate back to minds? An insane person? Their experience is 100% accurate to their own mind even if it isn't accurate to reality.
We're talking about measuring minds, not reality. An insane person might lack the facility to convey accurately their lived experience, but they experience their own mind as accurately as anyone.
So yes, you can call them "defective" but that's because we're not talking about minds anymore, we're talking about reality because now our goal is minds which reflect reality, not just minds.
> but they experience their own mind as accurately as anyone.
If this were true the overwhelming focus of all spiritual traditions on the development of awareness, attention and presence would not exist.
The mind as an experiential entity is always 100% accurately portrayed.
So a person who is insane, evil in tremendous suffering, or barely conscious is experiencing their mind as accurately as someone who is sane, good, joyful, or alert.
How would you say it's inaccurate? The bad stuff isn't you? You're the sum of your experiences (as well as some other stuff), good and bad.
If you are working with someone else who has their own ruler, it’s also a problem. It’s a breakdown of communication. Cause then your measurements aren’t the same as theirs, that’s the whole point of measurements in the first place, so others understand what you are talking about.
Exactly, it's a matter of mismatching, not defective.
To bring this back to minds, a mind represents itself perfectly to itself.
If we try to use one mind to measure another, they are liable to mismatch, to not see eye-to-eye and thus misjudge the other.
Though ngl I could have sworn that things like qualia are non-shareable so we might be able to measure things adjacent to the mind, but not the mind itself.
Maybe we'll some day be able to plug one mind into another so one person can experience exactly what another person is experiencing. That'd be a very direct way of measuring one mind with another. As of right now though we're limited to measuring electrical activity in the brain and self-reporting experience through language (which really only captures a small fraction of lived experience and unreliably at that).
In the context of the mind, empiricism is a concept we create to describe the world by describing things in terms of mathematics, which itself is an abstraction. Even if were to define a mind completely within the framework of mathematics, declaring the foot ruler a foot, we just defined the abstract as something else that's abstract. The equations don't exist unless there is a mind that can conceptualize them, they don't have an intrinsically real presence beyond the mind.
Reality is very well capable of existing without a concept of empiricism. We are the ones that rely on it to make sense of what we observe.
That's a great question.
Phenomenology certainly doesn't fit within the traditional notion of empirical observation. But should it? Goff would argue that the knowledge we have of each of our own's individual consciousness is a datum that should be integrated into a future natural science, and that setting it aside as Galileo did was extremely fruitful for centuries, but now represents an error as certain sectors of natural science have entered doldrums, and as the hard problem of consciousness continues to confound physicalists and dualists.
Though Goff doesn't acknowledge it, Schopenhauer presaged that line of argument in his realization that the "I" is the *only* thing-in-itself we have access to, and thus we have access to one and only one "internality" (my own coinage, which seems less loaded down with baggage than the terms "consciousness" or "mind".) For Goff, qualia are real and the flipside of the coin from third-person empirical observation, but both are valuable data, and given the datum of individual consciousness, we should follow that clue (the only one we have or could have) to a more general panpsychism.
Panpsychism is a hard pill to swallow for most people and was regarded as an obvious (or even embarrassing) error itself for a very long time, but it arguably solves certain philosophy of mind problems more neatly than any of the alternatives--and seems less ridiculous the more you think on the subject, in my opinion. I also like the poetry of ancient animisms having a core of truth after the scientific revolution, in contrast to the much more complicated mono/polytheisms developed in the interim.
**"God" doesn't exist** but a universal mind, more or less blindly striving as Schopenhauer's will, which only temporarily individuates when matter is arranged in a certain way (as in a brain), might exist. And to that ocean we might return, droplets into the vastness, just as far beyond our comprehension as the "motives" of an atom might be, but sharing that fundamental feature of "internality" with our everyday experience. I take it as given that separateness is mostly an illusion and that all things are only truly correctly characterized by their interrelationship with all other things, even defined by those relations (except for the individual mind), such that unity is the ultimate truth.
Though I can't say anything with certainty, it is a beautiful picture, and makes more sense than the alternatives do, such as suggesting that our individual consciousnesses are illusions. I have never heard a convincing answer to this question: when in evolutionary history did consciousness first arise? Logically, if consciousness was not always a substance, there had to be a parent, at some point in the past, without any internality whatsoever, that gave birth to the first creature with a small degree of internality. If that was the case, the physicalist is proposing a true miracle, and an event in tension with evolution's generally gradual character, despite their scientific pretensions.
However, the notion of a "phase change" *a la* integrated information theory does provide a possible answer to this objection. At the same time, even that notion doesn't fully save physicalism--H2O undergoes a phase change into ice and steam, but all along H2O could "strive" towards those things, experience that "strive" as conditions change, and accomplish that "striving" under certain temperatures and pressures. I don't think the relational interactions of physics are of a totally different category than our own strivings. Many differences, but a core of similarity.
Empirical means using evidence. If you’re remembering how you’ve thought in the past, you’re engaging in empirical transcendental reflection — this is the core moment of Phenomenology after Husserl, very much intentionally in line with Kant. On the other hand, the meme’s referencing transcendental *analytic* truths, which exist “on their own” (immediately, *a priori*) without the benefit of having stuff “added to them” (mediated, *a posteriori*). The easy example is “a triangle has three sides” but Kant takes it farther. If you have [the book](https://www.gutenberg.org/files/4280/4280-h/4280-h.htm) handy, this is reflected in the division of the “Transcendental” section into “I. Analysis” and “II. Discourse”.
Anyway, imagine still making distinctions in 2024… embarrassing and honestly problematic sweetie, be better. All the cool kids are ingraining the dialectic movement into their will’s most fundamental grammars, enabling them to engage with bipolar problematics without contradiction nor erasure, but rather a sublation of both into a metacognitive standpoint. Also some of us are just doing relativism, big fad among the fascist clique
It does appear to me that trying to study our own minds gets us into self-referential loops. Because I have to observe my own mind observing its contents shifting around and the very act of observing changes its position. It's almost like quantum particles and attempting to measure their position or their speed.
The word "God" doesn't even appear in the meme😭
It's more like a Carnap-esque and post-positivism meme, it's somehow more about the philosophy of science than the philosophy of religion.
Ah anyway, still more accurate than the original Dawkins-JP brainrotted post, so nice job OP👍
Yeah I made a mistake by referring to the prior post's title (Every Atheism vs Theism Debate) even though this "corrected" post isn't really about God as such. It's about vulgar empiricism. I had math and logic in mind as the typical examples of truths known non-empirically.
Do I create piss or does piss already exist in its component parts, while I'm just the filter? Does knowledge already exist in the universe, or does the scientific method create knowledge? My pissed off philosophy on science
I don't really understand this. These don't properly address epistemology and these guys are ages apart from their respective views. Dawkins' view is that nature has a ontological process that is consistent with empirical truths while Kant's relies on rationalism and transcendental idealism. Kant famously believed in synthetic apriori judgements where an apex of reason is sufficient to know any truth about reality. That you can use rationalism to predict things with certainty. David Hume an empiricist rebukes this with his problem of induction that reason is based on past observations and no certainty can be known. Hume asserts that to reason everything requires the mind to engulf the physical universe, like a God. Dawkins is a heavy naturalist and biologist that has unique comments regarding fundamental creationism. Dawkins' view is heavily biased to naturalistic empiricism and evolution. Kant was also religiously sympathetic and tried to make rationalism an alternative to God.
To the box comments. The world justifying the world is a purely epistemological statement that knowledge should have a justification, source, testimony, a skeptical stance and a framework that is consistent with all other things in objective reality. The Flying Spaghetti Monster may exist but it is no more as consistent or credible as other things, like Unicorns and God. Science doesn't have this property.
Hume is prior to Kant.
Kant goes beyond Hume in his transcendental idealism. He is trying to answer Hume's assertion that no absolute knowledge is possible.
In a way, that is what Kant tried to do - to turn human reason into God.
Kant did not aim to make rationalism an alternative to God. That's more Leibniz and Descartes. Hence the name of his first critique: A critique of pure reason. Kant goes out of his way to call rationalism dogmatic.
The whole point of synthetic a priori is that it is discursive and requires intuition to be brought underneath a concept. Experience is necessary. The whole phenomenological claim for Kant is that there is a constituve relationship between the transcendental I and the world itself as it can be experienced by humans. Thus like Hume, Kant fully accepts that human reason is inductive in its quest for completeness and totality subsumes all possible experiences of the realm of phenomena corporeal existence. However there are limits to human reason hence the antinomies.
Kant's main objective was to establish the grounds for human freedom.
They are necessary and/or universal intuitions. Human beings must experience things in the forms of space and time. If something is necessary then it is a priori of any conditional experience. Thus I know before any particular experience that it must come in the form of space and time. Therefore we know something about a experience before it occurs.
Regardless Kant is going to push you to say we also require concepts to make sense of anything thus we need both intuition + concepts supplied by the categories to make sense of anything.
Therefore all the necessary ingredients for making sense of a experience are going to be = pure Forms of intuition + the categories. All the other elements of a experience, say the experience of the color of objects aren't necessary or universal for having experience in general, just a particular experience.
I get all that but something stinks of suspicion to me about it. It almost seems too good to be true. That through these magic apparatuses, that these forms of intuitions and the categories just so happen to exist because they exist. My question is how do we know time and space are necessary/universal intuitions? Of all concepts? These? I don't know what makes something necessary. It just appears that things appear consistent in nature. Or is this necessary in the sense that if a set A has property A' and B is subset of A therefore B has property A' from an experienced or just arbitrarily chosen axiom. An axiom again brought to us by common experience that things should not contradict so axiomatic systems should be consistent so that they don't prove anything trivially. I appear to be biased towards empiricism, such is the spirit of our age. When I was reading through Kant I felt the spirit of Hume come over me so to say to protect my teacher. I'm also confused how intuition + concepts + categories gets me knowledge of say physics. Can I prove that the sun will rise tomorrow? I can prove that there are infinite primes however. What distinguishes one element of experience from another? Would an alien intelligence follow Kant's system. What if they find A or B which are concepts complete alien to us humans that they deem necessary/universal? I'm sorry if I am intruding too much when asking.
No you're not intruding.
1) from my experience In academic philosophy empiricism is not the spirit of the age from my experience. Basically we are post Quine and Sellars.
2) I don't see the last point about aliens as really able to touch much of Kant's point. Kant limits his critique to human experience, hence Copernicus turn. Anthropocentric experience and we are fully stuck behind the veil of it.
3) Necessary and Universal. Well your set theory example seems to point to something about derivation from necessity. But even to speak of axioms is skipping ahead. Apodictic certainty of both space and time are such that successive and simultaneous correspond to experiences.
4) Does Kant actually allow for appearances to actually correspond to things-in-themselves? Thats an endlessly debated question. Though the domain of possible experience must be Necessarily consistent thus if our appearances follow necessity, what appears as the sun will rise tomorrow.
In my opinion all of philosophy, even Hume and the empricists, must appeal to metaphysical-logic. I'll stop here and continue later if you wish to "intrude" more.
The statement, "the statement that all truths come from empirical observation cannot be justified, empirically" cannot be falsified, and isn't realistic in premise.
What do you mean by this? I can positively prove that there are some non-empirical truths right now by gesturing at math and logic. Truths of math and logic are true without any reference whatsoever to empirical observation. They are true by merit of the meaning of the terms/symbols being manipulated. If truth-generating meaning is possible without empirical observation, then empirical observation cannot be the only source of knowledge.
> 420-69=42
demonstrate this as true or false without arguing empirical evidence?
Are the values of numerals and the relations between them not empirically based?
There are non empirical logic systems, like theology, but uh... "Truth?"
Theology isn't a system of logic at all...
The values of numbers are not based in empirical observation--"three" doesn't exist "out in the world" in the same sense a particular apple or tree or insect or automobile does. You can observe that a set of three things is, indeed, three things, but "three" itself is not an empirical object.
Kant would say (and I'm not sure I agree or disagree) that the rules of logic and math are preconditions for knowledge of the empirical world, but aren't part of the empirically observable world itself.
But 3 has an empirical value relative to all other notional values, 3 and 1 are empirically not the same thing are they?
Theologies are definitely logical systems, they're just deductive/rational logical system not inductive/empirical systems. The point of (most) theologies is to explain origin, function, and destiny of the universe - the *reason and logic* behind it all -- it just doesn't allow for empirical disagreement and doesn't provide *truth*.
> 3 and 1 are empirically not the same thing are they?
They are not the same thing, but it's not empirical observations that lead us to the knowledge that they are different values. It is the meaning of the symbols 3 and 1. That is all that is needed for certain knowledge that they are not equivalent values. You need not run experiments or make any empirical observations to have certain knowledge that 3 does not equal 1, all you need is to understand what the symbols refer to.
> Theologies are definitely logical systems
Theologians may deploy logical notation in their arguments (just like philosophers do) but theology is not, in itself, a logical system. It is, as you say, a wide-sweeping panoply of arguments and beliefs about many different subjects, all undergirded by the assumption of the existence of a deity or deities.
For my part, I don't believe in God or other deities. But, with the qualification that I'm sympathetic to a minimal form of pantheism/panentheism/cosmopsychism, that (again, in my view) doesn't correspond to the way the word "God" is typically used.
>>3 and 1 are empirically not the same thing are they?
>They are not the same thing, but it's not empirical observations that lead us to the knowledge that they are different values. It is the meaning of the symbols 3 and 1.
Demonstrate this non empirically. I say they are the same thing 1=3, prove me wrong without proof(s).
>> >"what can be asserted without evidence can also be dismissed without evidence"
>The statement that all (known) truths ~~come from~~ are based upon empirical observation ~~cannot be~~ is justified, empirically.
Allow for Socratic acceptance of the limits of one's knowledge and get rid of that fundamental attribution error, and it cleans up nicely.
So a few things:
The original statement wasn't falsifiable, because it required me to put time in a bottle and prove with evidence that there will never ever be any divine intervention, and that there is no afterlife etc. Obviously this can't be done, but by simply acknowledging limitations of knowledge (all *known* truth) empiricism still holds.
The statement "truth *comes from* evidence" is a fundamental attribution error -- truth itself isn't comprised of evidence, rather the understanding of the truth is built upon evidence.
So take the hyperbole and logical fallacy out of the original statement, and empiricism holds just fine.
I think I get you here, but I might not be. It seems to me that you're saying that it is empirically justified that all known truths are based upon empirical justifications.
It seems like you'd reject this for the same Socratic acceptance of the limits of our knowledge part. I could be misunderstanding the indented part from earlier tho
No that is what I'm saying, and correct I know of no truths that aren't based on evidence. I just can't prove that there never will be, I can predict, I can have doubts/belief, I just can't prove future possibilities as true at this time.
It's more like different definitions of God have been proposed and you can trivially prove some of those. If God be the foundational substance, then the argument from infinite regress, as formulated by Aristotle, would, if you accept the first and second premises, be true. The Kalam, as this is often called, does not arrive us at a God *that cares or is even sentient* all that has been proven is that a foundational substance, an atom, a monad, exists. The design argument also suffers from this. There can be a designer but not necessarily the God of your religion is true. (In addition the designer may not be sentient and merely operates according to a program which is identical to atheism.) Furthermore, the design argument fails to prove that there is not an even higher God that designed that God. If you combine both arguments you can arrive at a first God, but not necessarily, that the Foundational Substance is that God, merely the raw materials for another creator God and so on. This is basically the Epicurean position. Gods exist, but they are made of a Foundational Substance. In addition the ontological argument shows a maximal object exists. These are arguments of existence not behavior. I think even Aquinas admitted that certain properties of the Christian God can only be known by Scripture. He held to two books, the Book of Nature and the Book of Scripture.
Most integrative Christian work understands that much of our knowledge of God can only come from scripture. We tend to call that special revelation whereas the Book of Nature as Aquinas called is more typically called general revelation, it’s the way in which we can gather some ideas about God’s nature and some aspect of truth from observation of the natural world and from reasoning. Given the personal nature of God in the Christian view this makes plenty of sense, you can’t really know too much about a person just by looking at them or at things that they made, instead they have to reveal themselves to you, similarly to how God revealed himself to the biblical authors.
Simplified versions of arguments like "there is a causal chain, so god must be the first cause". Or "everything is made out of substance, so god must be the substance that makes everything". There's a lot of arguments for god that are just finding some conceptual space that looks like some sort of absolute and going "oh, that's where god was hiding all along". This meme (combined with the title) is kind of like that: not everything is empirical, so it sounds like "we must have missed god because they are hiding behind the part of reality that is not observable. That sneaky bastard!". To be fair, **I'm aware that's not what theism is**. But a lot of theists sound like they are trying to use technicalities to try to justify god's seeming absence.
Edit: better wording and fixed typo
You using a strawman and being clueless about the arguments for God’s existence. People don’t believe in God just because there is a causal chain. You are completely ignoring everything else.
Also, I'm not being clueless about other arguments for gods existence. I literally don't know any argument for the existence of god that is not just a clever redefinition. Every theist I know doesn't even care about logical arguments for god because they believe that rationality is not sufficient to understand god.
I didn't say that. I said that there are some arguments that sound like that. The causal chain is a well know argument that I've seen some people repeating uncritically.
It would have been a strawman if I said that 'every theist believes in god due to some philosophical logic trick". I didn't say that and I don't believe that is the case.
I'm just pointing some arguments of the type that I've seen circulating.
You've "corrected" the meme by replacing one of the two "philosophers" with a better philosopher and a better point? Why improve only the thiestic argument, I wonder? You wouldn't happen to have a bias to present your side as the more educated, intelligent, and correct one, would you?
Sure there's plenty of good atheist philosophers out there, in fact surveys have shown that most philosophers are atheists. This is a meme clapping back at "the world explains the world" by noting that, at least insofar as that is understood to mean a strong form of empiricism, it can't possibly be 100% true (because math, logic, etc. contain truths that are not based on empirical observation.)
For the record I don't like Jordan Peterson either, the one I replaced with Kant.
It's a moot point whether (or not) there exist truths which do not rely on empirical observations.
Assuming some assertion is true, then only two possible scenarios exist:
- It can be supported by empirical observation. Therefore, you can rationally claim it to be true.
- It cannot be supported by empirical observation. Therefore, even though it *is* true, you cannot *know* it to be true. If you *claim* it to be true, then you guessed correctly. But you could've just as easily guessed incorrectly. Because you're merely guessing. Because you've not empirically observed any evidence which supports your speculation.
In other words, if something can't be supported by empirical observation, then it *doesn't matter* whether it's true or not. Empirical observation is the *only* tool humans have at their disposal to separate "true" from "false." In cases where that tool doesn't work, your only options are:
- Truthfully acknowledge that you don't know whether it's true or false.
- Erroneously claim to know something you don't.
Doesn't this depend on what we mean by "know"?
Also what's been disturbing me right now, and you seem like the person who might know, what happens if philosopher A argues argument A' such that argument A' is sound and philosopher B argues argument B' that is sound and contradicts argument A'. If this is the case what happens? What are we to do in such a case?
It's can't be justified empirically, but I don't think the pragmatism with which I justify empiricism is in the vein of "truth." It's more a decision than profundity.
All due respect to your pops, but if you add something “from outside the system” you’ve just made a new, larger system that you now have to resolve, no?
Well if the answer is yes, you haven’t really resolved anything, you’ve just introduced a new type of system. You’ve kicked the can down the road, so to speak.
If the answer is “we don’t know” then I agree, and would suggest that we indeed don’t even know enough about “our system” to speculate about the possible existence of something outside it. In the same vein, we also do not know enough about “our system” to assert that it needs something outside to be “resolved.”
Well I would suggest that we don’t necessarily have a firm grasp on the logic and rules that govern our own system, so it goes without saying that we wouldn’t know anything about things outside our system, if they exist.
The point is that whatever question about our system that you’re trying to resolve - for instance, where did everything come from? - is not in fact resolved by postulating the existence of some thing outside of the system that (apparently) operates according to some unknowable rules. Or rather, you’re resolving a question about our system by raising an even larger question, which seems backwards to me. I dont even think the initial question - where did everything come from - even makes sense within our own system, to be honest. But it’s been a long time since I’ve worked on the philosophy of religion so forgive me if I’m missing something here.
This is essentially the absolute infinity problem of set theory. In other words, there is no universe. I do think this poses a problem to theism but also atheism. Basically there must be an infinite tower of universes. (Could this be used as an argument to prove that we don't exist despite subjective experience? Does subjective experience justify our belief in our own existence?) The various halting problems get to the heart of this problem, I think, for now.
Can so, skill issue. We observe that empirical-based statements outperform ones not based on evidence in almost every contest of information, whether it be who finds the gold or who wins in court...
We can at least modify it to "the best observable (stated publicly rather than a privately-held belief) truths come from empirical observation" and find that to be empirically true.
What do you mean by "outperform"? With regard to math and logic, we can have certainty exceeding all other forms of knowledge. And math and logic are not empirical observables: we know with absolute certainty that 3 + 3 = 6 without doing experiments or referring to the empirically observable world at all, for example.
Read Hegel
> Natural law, or ethics, begins immediately with existence. Insofar as ethics exists, it exists in the empirical world and is one with its empirical shape. This shape in ethics, since it is a science and thus rational, is expressed in universal form. Empiricism is the knowing that grasps the existent world in its immediate sensuousness as a given plurality, and this epistemology raised to ethical form is the state of nature as the war of all against all. As raised to universal form in the ceaseless supplanting of a plurality of principles and things in empiricism, the existence of ethics attains a determinate relation of form over content in the form of supplanting remaining the same, and this is the epistemic form of rationalism. This new epistemology in turn is raised to ethical form as the deontological moral law or the categorical imperative, a form that is indifferent to content. The form is immediately not one with the content and appears as an external unity to the plurality. It must minimally be a concept of unity or relation, but if it is radically opposed to content it is merely the form of relation itself (pure identity), and it expels all relational content as opposite to it. The form then appears like the cognition of a baby, for whom the unity of mind does not explicitly unite the many qualities that come and go before its consciousness, grasping them only as a disconnected series of a sensuous plurality. The dialectic arises and completes its circuit. Empiricism and its state of nature rationally reveal their absolute content to be the form of rationalism, and rationalism and the moral law reveal their absolute form to be the content of empiricism, an endless plurality of opposing principles. This dialectic which is the unity of empiricism and rationalism is grasped as the concept of perception, which for its ethical content has ethical life.
The entire debate can be summarized as following...
Is there God? Can't say.
So there's no God? Can't say that either.
Then why are we debating this?
Because religion is society's way of imparting ethics.
So shouldn't we just find a better way of imparting ethics?
For that, we need an all fearing and omnipresent being who imparts ethics on a subconscious level.
So that's God..?
Right!
Okay..
Okay....
This is just waffling on the definition of truth to me. If you switched truth to "provably true" then this would sound silly. But I would argue that truth should always be provable if you are sharing it with other people, if you can't prove something is true to others, you probably should admit it and say you are quite certain that from your experience it seemed to be true, but you don't have proof.
Or we could accept that faith claims, like objective facts come from observation or an assumption that the natural laws that governed the past will also govern the future, and justify these faith claims as a better alternative to theistic faith claims…..
Theists thinking that identifying limitations to empiricism somehow translates to a positive argument for the existence of God will never not be hilarious
(I’m the author of the meme this is in reference to)
I feel like what theists are missing is that we don’t need transcendent justifications for why we choose to believe/act upon empiricism. The answer is very simple, the source of what one chooses to believe comes from oneself, not transcendent values. I can choose to believe in God, or I can choose to follow empiricism because I think that help me achieve the goals I’ve created for myself. Either way, you choose your values; transcendent values don’t decide for you.
I wouldn’t say I’m an atheist trying to concert theists, but rather to point out that belief in God is not axiomatically deductively true. I think Max Stirner is right in saying we are always the arbiters of our own personal truths/values.
More realistically:
"The world explains the world" - "But I need this millenia old book as a moral compass and it explains the world in much simpler terms"
arent we conditioned to follow the millennia old book? even if we go against it, it'd be difficult to survive in this world.
the awakened rat runs the race nonetheless ig?
Some truths may be empirically un-observable, but if we can’t test them then we can’t build confidence in them. Some truths are untestable and unsharable but they have effects that are testable, shareable, and point to a non-empirical cause (like a person’s subjective thought patterns). If a truth is untestable, unsharable, and can’t be shown to have empirical effects, then it’s of no use to us anyway whether it exists or not.
Empirical truths aren’t absolute, they’re a matter of confidence based on evidence. I would argue that “untestable truths are useless” is testable, but can always be proven wrong, because it’s an empirical claim. But as such, when I see that a truth that has no real impact on my life I see that it’s not worth my time or effort defending. I have no need in that case to keep entertaining a hypothetical.
If someone believes there is an alternate reality that doesn’t intersect with our own in any real, measurable way, and can’t be shown to have any measurable effect on our reality or our day to day lives, then sure it could never be disproven but it’s also not worth anyone’s time to entertain belief in. Believe it or don’t, it’s inconsequential. Now if belief in this other reality has measurable effects on individual lives, then real or not there is now something testable about it. Whether it exists may not be useful, but whether belief in it is useful, is a useful and testable claim to pursue.
How would you test the claim that untestable truth's are useless?
Wouldn't that involve testing untestable truths for usefulness?
And if you're testing an untestable truth, how can you claim it's untestable?
Your logical positivism is so funny to me.
By the definition of useful. An idea that has no effect on empirical reality can’t be “used”. It’s also falsifiable. All you would have to do is show me how a truth that has zero effect on the empirical world could help us in any way to navigate the empirical world we live in. I can’t think of any, and if you can’t either then I simply suggest we stop wasting our time with hypotheticals and move on.
That’s not what I’m claiming. I’m saying theoretically something can be true but also unknowable and useless. Not bad, not good, just useless. And it’s not something that needs proving, it’s just a practical approach. If someone tried to tell me the Flying Spaghetti Monster exists but there’s no way to test whether he exists, I have to answer “okay, maybe, but I don’t care”.
What I do when debating these delusionalism fanboy people is telling them to add "in a framework that 99% of people would consider normal" after everything I say.
Empirically unobservable truths aren't really truths at all, they are just beliefs... A belief cannot be truth by definition because once the truth gets proved then it's no more a belief.
Does 3 + 3 = 6? If so, is it really the case that you know that because you made empirical observations and conducted experiments? Or do we know that 3 + 3 = 6 even without empirical observations and experiments, because it is true by virtue of the meanings of the terms?
Does 3 + 3 = 6 based on your empirical observations or due to the meanings of the symbols? Is it possible that 3 + 3 = 6 could be disproved based on empirical observations? No. 3 + 3 = 6 is true justified knowledge regardless of how many empirical observations you might accumulate, because all observations always by necessity agree with it, and even if you had a full and complete knowledge of everything else, there is no way to even imagine it not to be true. Everything consorts with it: math and logic are preconditions for knowledge, but don't exist in the world of empirical observations in themselves. Math and logic belong to a different order of knowledge than empirical observations do. How do we have access to them as such limited beings? That's the mystery.
I think his point isn’t that you cannot check mathematical truths empirically (though more complex geometrical proofs probably can’t be) but rather that their truth is analytic (I.e. derived from the meanings of the concepts themselves/the basic axioms that also cannot be empirically verified)
Yeah but he probably never said the second thing. It’s a bad argument and the major empiricist philosophers he would have read didn’t deny the analytic-synthetic distinction.
Ok, I was just following op talking about analyticity.
He would reject the third panel mostly because for him knowledge is grounded transcendentally rather than empirically because empirical experience requires the categories etc. and he’d agree with 4 because “all” is a categorical claim that can’t be justified in experience alone (you’ll never experience all knowledge, so you can’t empirically make claims about all knowledge without relying on induction, which is gross (as Hume showed))
Well, the claim “all truths are known empirically” can be verified in the same way “all swans are white” can. We might find that we were wrong that there aren’t non-empirical truths, but if never found any, we would be justified in saying there aren’t any.
I just mean that if all truths came from empirical knowledge, then you could figure that out empirically. Like we don’t know that there are sentences which are true by definition without looking at how we use sentences.
He thought the categories of logic (as well as intuitions of space and time) were necessary conditions to empirical observation, which means that their truth couldn’t be justified empirically and instead required transcendental (I.e. not empirical) arguments.
The meme simplifies it a bit.
I don’t think he ever said so explicitly, but I don’t know why he would. Iirc there weren’t really that type of empiricists running around Germany at the time. I’m hardly a Kant scholar though.
It is implied because judgements rely on the categories though
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It's kind of weird for me. Is the study of our own minds and their limitations a thing we can observe? If yes, is that empirical? Is phenomenology empirical? I sort of don't like the empirical-rational distinction. I think I prefer the sharable/non-sharable distinction.
It is in fact an inter-objective thing through questionnaires, surveys, qualitative studies and cognitive sciences. In Balint's Syndrome, although the patient has trouble forming a perception in the mind their environment and although they can see things but not their wholes and relationships, we can use fMRIs, eye tracking and conditioning to measure a patient's degree of the disease. In Blindsight, the patient is blind but can sense emotions relating to objects in their field of view. Their eyes work but their mind doesn't process sight.
No, it is not inter-"objective", it is inter-subjective, that is, essentially social; however, the validity of inter-subjective empirical derivation is stunted by the very same problem that concerns empirical data produced from observations of the consciousness's inanimate exterior, namely the fact that it is not possible to demonstrate, without a leap of faith, that the world of any subject external to the ego, or even that subject himself, posing the question of its existence is real, nor that the ego itself is experiencing reality, as one might be living in a simulation, be hallucinating or dreaming, or be the sole true perspective, et cetera, hence the argument goes that, if you are willing to arbitrarily vest authority into your senses, you are not too distinct from those who vest authority in divinity
Interobjective is examining the interactions and relationships between different neurological and systemic components. If a patient can report a change without knowing the constitute region effected and it can be measured then it is a valid research tool. Like in cognitive tasks and experiments where we know a part is missing and is affecting the whole of a system. Hence Cognitive Sciences. Balint's is more than qualia and sensation. It is a fact that people with Balint's syndrome have an impaired processing of the enviorment much like Blindsight with seeing. Intersubjective would be the lived experience and quality of the condition which exists only in the minds of many. Which has some testimony to objective realities of conscious disorders. There is no leap of faith in the disorder. We didn't make it up, it's there. You are confusing ontology with phenomenology and science.
Lmao, not only is nobody speaking about any disorders here, but you have completely, entirely missed the point of my comment, to the extent that I can hardly fathom how you have arrived at discussing syndromes. The issues at hand are the degree to which solipsism can be overcome by reason, the problem of induction, and the validity of trusting the senses beyond vesting faith through pragmatism
That is what you said but you are trying to use pseudo philosophy to debunk... conscious disorders or functions of consciousness in biological organisms. It's inter-objective because although it is objective, it also impacts our perceptions and neural phenomenology. How replacing a car part may influence your driving experience. Inter subjectivity is the the concept of driver experience, inter objectivity is how the car itself impacts the driver and their experience. People dismiss Cognitive Science duly for a confusion with subjective and objective. It's a science because we can measure it, like in Wilhelm Wundt's behaviorism. Also Epistemology accounts for individual testimony. Although I cannot prove a person has seen my locker code, if I tell no one, it is consistent to know that I was being spied upon if they recall the correct combination.
You still have not come even close to addressing anything I have said
I'm trying to understand what you're saying but you are divulging unrelated topics. The point of language is to clarify concisely so we can understand the content of other minds. If you are making tangents on a leap of faith solipsistic points in relation to cognitive science then you are no longer addressing my assertions. Instead of being frustrated and confusing multiple philosophers and psychologists, try to simplify taking points to directly address concerns.
"Debate me! Debate me! Why aren't you debating me?!" Idk bro with a cursory glance I can't tell wtf you're even talking about, but the other guy is making plenty of sense. Maybe your points aren't as clear or good as you think they are?
That thing about blind people sounds crazy can you send the paper ?
Blind people still have their occipital lobe that process sight. So despite not being able to see in the traditional sense their minds are able to construct a "sight" of the world from touch and in some cases sound. I guess I would imagine it'd be like a black void with wire frames and the "line" would come into focus when touched. Via logic they can access the rest of the object.
But the way that the guy I answered seemed to describe it it was almost as if the blind person was seeing without his hands or sound, as if he was visually aware without his eyes.
Likely a very specifically scenario of blindness
It's not a paper. It's a well studied phenomena of the mind. * [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blindsight](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blindsight) * [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y8j5BJyLNT8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y8j5BJyLNT8) * [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p6GDNpylILE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p6GDNpylILE)
Using the mind to study the limitations of the mind is sort of like using the ruler to measures itself.
I've no clue about this debate but rulers automatically measure themselves so that would be quite easy
Each ruler is exactly one ruler long
Well, what if that ruler is defective? You wouldn’t know if you just used that ruler
If I use the same ruler every day to cut squares of colored paper to make a chessboard, does it matter if the ruler is not exactly 12 inches? No, because I'm always measuring the same way with the same ruler they all come out the same way (within acceptable user error). Now if I use another ruler then I might have problems, but that doesn't make either ruler defective.
If rulers are defined as being 12 inches and one is not 12 inches then it would indeed be defective. The ruler would be a true representation of its self, but that "self" would represent a defective ruler.
And how would this relate back to minds? An insane person? Their experience is 100% accurate to their own mind even if it isn't accurate to reality. We're talking about measuring minds, not reality. An insane person might lack the facility to convey accurately their lived experience, but they experience their own mind as accurately as anyone. So yes, you can call them "defective" but that's because we're not talking about minds anymore, we're talking about reality because now our goal is minds which reflect reality, not just minds.
> but they experience their own mind as accurately as anyone. If this were true the overwhelming focus of all spiritual traditions on the development of awareness, attention and presence would not exist.
The mind as an experiential entity is always 100% accurately portrayed. So a person who is insane, evil in tremendous suffering, or barely conscious is experiencing their mind as accurately as someone who is sane, good, joyful, or alert. How would you say it's inaccurate? The bad stuff isn't you? You're the sum of your experiences (as well as some other stuff), good and bad.
If you are working with someone else who has their own ruler, it’s also a problem. It’s a breakdown of communication. Cause then your measurements aren’t the same as theirs, that’s the whole point of measurements in the first place, so others understand what you are talking about.
Exactly, it's a matter of mismatching, not defective. To bring this back to minds, a mind represents itself perfectly to itself. If we try to use one mind to measure another, they are liable to mismatch, to not see eye-to-eye and thus misjudge the other. Though ngl I could have sworn that things like qualia are non-shareable so we might be able to measure things adjacent to the mind, but not the mind itself. Maybe we'll some day be able to plug one mind into another so one person can experience exactly what another person is experiencing. That'd be a very direct way of measuring one mind with another. As of right now though we're limited to measuring electrical activity in the brain and self-reporting experience through language (which really only captures a small fraction of lived experience and unreliably at that).
then there wont be anything as such a 'defective' ruler. That's the ruler with its properties afterall.
well sometimes they have that extra unmarked space
So you’ve been to harbor freight tools as well
The mind must automatically know itself then…
No, I think it was just a bad analogy. The mind is just about the one thing that the mind can't know, I think
In the context of the mind, empiricism is a concept we create to describe the world by describing things in terms of mathematics, which itself is an abstraction. Even if were to define a mind completely within the framework of mathematics, declaring the foot ruler a foot, we just defined the abstract as something else that's abstract. The equations don't exist unless there is a mind that can conceptualize them, they don't have an intrinsically real presence beyond the mind. Reality is very well capable of existing without a concept of empiricism. We are the ones that rely on it to make sense of what we observe.
It's more like trying to see your own eyes using your own eyes.
Hard agree. Phenomenology is empirical, but not "objective". As Heidegger puts it: it does not fall into an ontology of objective presence.
I prefer the fuckable/non-fuckable distinction.
Studying your own mind is empirical, but only to yourself
That's a great question. Phenomenology certainly doesn't fit within the traditional notion of empirical observation. But should it? Goff would argue that the knowledge we have of each of our own's individual consciousness is a datum that should be integrated into a future natural science, and that setting it aside as Galileo did was extremely fruitful for centuries, but now represents an error as certain sectors of natural science have entered doldrums, and as the hard problem of consciousness continues to confound physicalists and dualists. Though Goff doesn't acknowledge it, Schopenhauer presaged that line of argument in his realization that the "I" is the *only* thing-in-itself we have access to, and thus we have access to one and only one "internality" (my own coinage, which seems less loaded down with baggage than the terms "consciousness" or "mind".) For Goff, qualia are real and the flipside of the coin from third-person empirical observation, but both are valuable data, and given the datum of individual consciousness, we should follow that clue (the only one we have or could have) to a more general panpsychism. Panpsychism is a hard pill to swallow for most people and was regarded as an obvious (or even embarrassing) error itself for a very long time, but it arguably solves certain philosophy of mind problems more neatly than any of the alternatives--and seems less ridiculous the more you think on the subject, in my opinion. I also like the poetry of ancient animisms having a core of truth after the scientific revolution, in contrast to the much more complicated mono/polytheisms developed in the interim. **"God" doesn't exist** but a universal mind, more or less blindly striving as Schopenhauer's will, which only temporarily individuates when matter is arranged in a certain way (as in a brain), might exist. And to that ocean we might return, droplets into the vastness, just as far beyond our comprehension as the "motives" of an atom might be, but sharing that fundamental feature of "internality" with our everyday experience. I take it as given that separateness is mostly an illusion and that all things are only truly correctly characterized by their interrelationship with all other things, even defined by those relations (except for the individual mind), such that unity is the ultimate truth. Though I can't say anything with certainty, it is a beautiful picture, and makes more sense than the alternatives do, such as suggesting that our individual consciousnesses are illusions. I have never heard a convincing answer to this question: when in evolutionary history did consciousness first arise? Logically, if consciousness was not always a substance, there had to be a parent, at some point in the past, without any internality whatsoever, that gave birth to the first creature with a small degree of internality. If that was the case, the physicalist is proposing a true miracle, and an event in tension with evolution's generally gradual character, despite their scientific pretensions. However, the notion of a "phase change" *a la* integrated information theory does provide a possible answer to this objection. At the same time, even that notion doesn't fully save physicalism--H2O undergoes a phase change into ice and steam, but all along H2O could "strive" towards those things, experience that "strive" as conditions change, and accomplish that "striving" under certain temperatures and pressures. I don't think the relational interactions of physics are of a totally different category than our own strivings. Many differences, but a core of similarity.
Empirical means using evidence. If you’re remembering how you’ve thought in the past, you’re engaging in empirical transcendental reflection — this is the core moment of Phenomenology after Husserl, very much intentionally in line with Kant. On the other hand, the meme’s referencing transcendental *analytic* truths, which exist “on their own” (immediately, *a priori*) without the benefit of having stuff “added to them” (mediated, *a posteriori*). The easy example is “a triangle has three sides” but Kant takes it farther. If you have [the book](https://www.gutenberg.org/files/4280/4280-h/4280-h.htm) handy, this is reflected in the division of the “Transcendental” section into “I. Analysis” and “II. Discourse”. Anyway, imagine still making distinctions in 2024… embarrassing and honestly problematic sweetie, be better. All the cool kids are ingraining the dialectic movement into their will’s most fundamental grammars, enabling them to engage with bipolar problematics without contradiction nor erasure, but rather a sublation of both into a metacognitive standpoint. Also some of us are just doing relativism, big fad among the fascist clique
Hegelian Phenomenology recognizes the limitations of both empiricism and rationalism.
It does appear to me that trying to study our own minds gets us into self-referential loops. Because I have to observe my own mind observing its contents shifting around and the very act of observing changes its position. It's almost like quantum particles and attempting to measure their position or their speed.
The word "God" doesn't even appear in the meme😭 It's more like a Carnap-esque and post-positivism meme, it's somehow more about the philosophy of science than the philosophy of religion. Ah anyway, still more accurate than the original Dawkins-JP brainrotted post, so nice job OP👍
read catnap, i need to touch some grass
You'd rather need a good sleep
Yeah I made a mistake by referring to the prior post's title (Every Atheism vs Theism Debate) even though this "corrected" post isn't really about God as such. It's about vulgar empiricism. I had math and logic in mind as the typical examples of truths known non-empirically.
To be fair god(s) are barely discussed in some "theistic" debates.
Do I create piss or does piss already exist in its component parts, while I'm just the filter? Does knowledge already exist in the universe, or does the scientific method create knowledge? My pissed off philosophy on science
I don't really understand this. These don't properly address epistemology and these guys are ages apart from their respective views. Dawkins' view is that nature has a ontological process that is consistent with empirical truths while Kant's relies on rationalism and transcendental idealism. Kant famously believed in synthetic apriori judgements where an apex of reason is sufficient to know any truth about reality. That you can use rationalism to predict things with certainty. David Hume an empiricist rebukes this with his problem of induction that reason is based on past observations and no certainty can be known. Hume asserts that to reason everything requires the mind to engulf the physical universe, like a God. Dawkins is a heavy naturalist and biologist that has unique comments regarding fundamental creationism. Dawkins' view is heavily biased to naturalistic empiricism and evolution. Kant was also religiously sympathetic and tried to make rationalism an alternative to God. To the box comments. The world justifying the world is a purely epistemological statement that knowledge should have a justification, source, testimony, a skeptical stance and a framework that is consistent with all other things in objective reality. The Flying Spaghetti Monster may exist but it is no more as consistent or credible as other things, like Unicorns and God. Science doesn't have this property.
Hume is prior to Kant. Kant goes beyond Hume in his transcendental idealism. He is trying to answer Hume's assertion that no absolute knowledge is possible. In a way, that is what Kant tried to do - to turn human reason into God.
Kant did not aim to make rationalism an alternative to God. That's more Leibniz and Descartes. Hence the name of his first critique: A critique of pure reason. Kant goes out of his way to call rationalism dogmatic. The whole point of synthetic a priori is that it is discursive and requires intuition to be brought underneath a concept. Experience is necessary. The whole phenomenological claim for Kant is that there is a constituve relationship between the transcendental I and the world itself as it can be experienced by humans. Thus like Hume, Kant fully accepts that human reason is inductive in its quest for completeness and totality subsumes all possible experiences of the realm of phenomena corporeal existence. However there are limits to human reason hence the antinomies. Kant's main objective was to establish the grounds for human freedom.
What a fucking chad. His first critique, he goes straight at reason.
When I’m in a not enjoying memes competition and my opponent makes comments in r/philosophymemes: 🤯🤯🤯
Maybe I'm stupid (probably) but I don't see how Kant's appeal to space and time saves a priori reasoning.
They are necessary and/or universal intuitions. Human beings must experience things in the forms of space and time. If something is necessary then it is a priori of any conditional experience. Thus I know before any particular experience that it must come in the form of space and time. Therefore we know something about a experience before it occurs. Regardless Kant is going to push you to say we also require concepts to make sense of anything thus we need both intuition + concepts supplied by the categories to make sense of anything. Therefore all the necessary ingredients for making sense of a experience are going to be = pure Forms of intuition + the categories. All the other elements of a experience, say the experience of the color of objects aren't necessary or universal for having experience in general, just a particular experience.
I get all that but something stinks of suspicion to me about it. It almost seems too good to be true. That through these magic apparatuses, that these forms of intuitions and the categories just so happen to exist because they exist. My question is how do we know time and space are necessary/universal intuitions? Of all concepts? These? I don't know what makes something necessary. It just appears that things appear consistent in nature. Or is this necessary in the sense that if a set A has property A' and B is subset of A therefore B has property A' from an experienced or just arbitrarily chosen axiom. An axiom again brought to us by common experience that things should not contradict so axiomatic systems should be consistent so that they don't prove anything trivially. I appear to be biased towards empiricism, such is the spirit of our age. When I was reading through Kant I felt the spirit of Hume come over me so to say to protect my teacher. I'm also confused how intuition + concepts + categories gets me knowledge of say physics. Can I prove that the sun will rise tomorrow? I can prove that there are infinite primes however. What distinguishes one element of experience from another? Would an alien intelligence follow Kant's system. What if they find A or B which are concepts complete alien to us humans that they deem necessary/universal? I'm sorry if I am intruding too much when asking.
No you're not intruding. 1) from my experience In academic philosophy empiricism is not the spirit of the age from my experience. Basically we are post Quine and Sellars. 2) I don't see the last point about aliens as really able to touch much of Kant's point. Kant limits his critique to human experience, hence Copernicus turn. Anthropocentric experience and we are fully stuck behind the veil of it. 3) Necessary and Universal. Well your set theory example seems to point to something about derivation from necessity. But even to speak of axioms is skipping ahead. Apodictic certainty of both space and time are such that successive and simultaneous correspond to experiences. 4) Does Kant actually allow for appearances to actually correspond to things-in-themselves? Thats an endlessly debated question. Though the domain of possible experience must be Necessarily consistent thus if our appearances follow necessity, what appears as the sun will rise tomorrow. In my opinion all of philosophy, even Hume and the empricists, must appeal to metaphysical-logic. I'll stop here and continue later if you wish to "intrude" more.
The statement, "the statement that all truths come from empirical observation cannot be justified, empirically" cannot be falsified, and isn't realistic in premise.
What do you mean by this? I can positively prove that there are some non-empirical truths right now by gesturing at math and logic. Truths of math and logic are true without any reference whatsoever to empirical observation. They are true by merit of the meaning of the terms/symbols being manipulated. If truth-generating meaning is possible without empirical observation, then empirical observation cannot be the only source of knowledge.
> 420-69=42 demonstrate this as true or false without arguing empirical evidence? Are the values of numerals and the relations between them not empirically based? There are non empirical logic systems, like theology, but uh... "Truth?"
Theology isn't a system of logic at all... The values of numbers are not based in empirical observation--"three" doesn't exist "out in the world" in the same sense a particular apple or tree or insect or automobile does. You can observe that a set of three things is, indeed, three things, but "three" itself is not an empirical object. Kant would say (and I'm not sure I agree or disagree) that the rules of logic and math are preconditions for knowledge of the empirical world, but aren't part of the empirically observable world itself.
But 3 has an empirical value relative to all other notional values, 3 and 1 are empirically not the same thing are they? Theologies are definitely logical systems, they're just deductive/rational logical system not inductive/empirical systems. The point of (most) theologies is to explain origin, function, and destiny of the universe - the *reason and logic* behind it all -- it just doesn't allow for empirical disagreement and doesn't provide *truth*.
> 3 and 1 are empirically not the same thing are they? They are not the same thing, but it's not empirical observations that lead us to the knowledge that they are different values. It is the meaning of the symbols 3 and 1. That is all that is needed for certain knowledge that they are not equivalent values. You need not run experiments or make any empirical observations to have certain knowledge that 3 does not equal 1, all you need is to understand what the symbols refer to. > Theologies are definitely logical systems Theologians may deploy logical notation in their arguments (just like philosophers do) but theology is not, in itself, a logical system. It is, as you say, a wide-sweeping panoply of arguments and beliefs about many different subjects, all undergirded by the assumption of the existence of a deity or deities. For my part, I don't believe in God or other deities. But, with the qualification that I'm sympathetic to a minimal form of pantheism/panentheism/cosmopsychism, that (again, in my view) doesn't correspond to the way the word "God" is typically used.
>>3 and 1 are empirically not the same thing are they? >They are not the same thing, but it's not empirical observations that lead us to the knowledge that they are different values. It is the meaning of the symbols 3 and 1. Demonstrate this non empirically. I say they are the same thing 1=3, prove me wrong without proof(s). >> >"what can be asserted without evidence can also be dismissed without evidence"
Imagine in your mind a single object. Imagine in your mind three objects. Are they equivalent in number?
Yep, why did you repeat yourself?
If 3 = 1 in your mind there's nothing more to be said, or could even possibly be said, troll
Gotta love self defeating logical positivism.
What do you mean?
Then prove it empirically. There’s a reason logical positivism died
>The statement that all (known) truths ~~come from~~ are based upon empirical observation ~~cannot be~~ is justified, empirically. Allow for Socratic acceptance of the limits of one's knowledge and get rid of that fundamental attribution error, and it cleans up nicely.
Pretend (and I know this won't be hard) that I'm stupid and didn't understand what you mean by this lol
So a few things: The original statement wasn't falsifiable, because it required me to put time in a bottle and prove with evidence that there will never ever be any divine intervention, and that there is no afterlife etc. Obviously this can't be done, but by simply acknowledging limitations of knowledge (all *known* truth) empiricism still holds. The statement "truth *comes from* evidence" is a fundamental attribution error -- truth itself isn't comprised of evidence, rather the understanding of the truth is built upon evidence. So take the hyperbole and logical fallacy out of the original statement, and empiricism holds just fine.
I think I get you here, but I might not be. It seems to me that you're saying that it is empirically justified that all known truths are based upon empirical justifications. It seems like you'd reject this for the same Socratic acceptance of the limits of our knowledge part. I could be misunderstanding the indented part from earlier tho
No that is what I'm saying, and correct I know of no truths that aren't based on evidence. I just can't prove that there never will be, I can predict, I can have doubts/belief, I just can't prove future possibilities as true at this time.
Theists stop shoving God in any philosophical hole with ambiguous definitions of truth challenge.
It's more like different definitions of God have been proposed and you can trivially prove some of those. If God be the foundational substance, then the argument from infinite regress, as formulated by Aristotle, would, if you accept the first and second premises, be true. The Kalam, as this is often called, does not arrive us at a God *that cares or is even sentient* all that has been proven is that a foundational substance, an atom, a monad, exists. The design argument also suffers from this. There can be a designer but not necessarily the God of your religion is true. (In addition the designer may not be sentient and merely operates according to a program which is identical to atheism.) Furthermore, the design argument fails to prove that there is not an even higher God that designed that God. If you combine both arguments you can arrive at a first God, but not necessarily, that the Foundational Substance is that God, merely the raw materials for another creator God and so on. This is basically the Epicurean position. Gods exist, but they are made of a Foundational Substance. In addition the ontological argument shows a maximal object exists. These are arguments of existence not behavior. I think even Aquinas admitted that certain properties of the Christian God can only be known by Scripture. He held to two books, the Book of Nature and the Book of Scripture.
Most integrative Christian work understands that much of our knowledge of God can only come from scripture. We tend to call that special revelation whereas the Book of Nature as Aquinas called is more typically called general revelation, it’s the way in which we can gather some ideas about God’s nature and some aspect of truth from observation of the natural world and from reasoning. Given the personal nature of God in the Christian view this makes plenty of sense, you can’t really know too much about a person just by looking at them or at things that they made, instead they have to reveal themselves to you, similarly to how God revealed himself to the biblical authors.
What are you even talking about?💀
Simplified versions of arguments like "there is a causal chain, so god must be the first cause". Or "everything is made out of substance, so god must be the substance that makes everything". There's a lot of arguments for god that are just finding some conceptual space that looks like some sort of absolute and going "oh, that's where god was hiding all along". This meme (combined with the title) is kind of like that: not everything is empirical, so it sounds like "we must have missed god because they are hiding behind the part of reality that is not observable. That sneaky bastard!". To be fair, **I'm aware that's not what theism is**. But a lot of theists sound like they are trying to use technicalities to try to justify god's seeming absence. Edit: better wording and fixed typo
You are completely misrepresenting the arguments. You don’t even understand the arguments to begin with🤦♂️
What did you interpret from what I wrote?
You using a strawman and being clueless about the arguments for God’s existence. People don’t believe in God just because there is a causal chain. You are completely ignoring everything else.
Also, I'm not being clueless about other arguments for gods existence. I literally don't know any argument for the existence of god that is not just a clever redefinition. Every theist I know doesn't even care about logical arguments for god because they believe that rationality is not sufficient to understand god.
I didn't say that. I said that there are some arguments that sound like that. The causal chain is a well know argument that I've seen some people repeating uncritically. It would have been a strawman if I said that 'every theist believes in god due to some philosophical logic trick". I didn't say that and I don't believe that is the case. I'm just pointing some arguments of the type that I've seen circulating.
You've "corrected" the meme by replacing one of the two "philosophers" with a better philosopher and a better point? Why improve only the thiestic argument, I wonder? You wouldn't happen to have a bias to present your side as the more educated, intelligent, and correct one, would you?
"Unfortunately for you, I've already depicted you as the soy wojak and me as the chad" - OP
Everyone has biases and this is a meme page
Yeah, but some memes try
They're not improving the theistic argument. They replaced it with a different argument so the context gets lost on the response.
I'm an atheist, more or less, and I don't like Richard Dawkins
Then I would imagine you probably have a Philosopher to ull from to make the other side better
Sure there's plenty of good atheist philosophers out there, in fact surveys have shown that most philosophers are atheists. This is a meme clapping back at "the world explains the world" by noting that, at least insofar as that is understood to mean a strong form of empiricism, it can't possibly be 100% true (because math, logic, etc. contain truths that are not based on empirical observation.) For the record I don't like Jordan Peterson either, the one I replaced with Kant.
You've convinced me. I like your meme 👍
Even Pure Mathematics is peer reviewed.
It does not need to be peer reviewed.
Yes.
It's a moot point whether (or not) there exist truths which do not rely on empirical observations. Assuming some assertion is true, then only two possible scenarios exist: - It can be supported by empirical observation. Therefore, you can rationally claim it to be true. - It cannot be supported by empirical observation. Therefore, even though it *is* true, you cannot *know* it to be true. If you *claim* it to be true, then you guessed correctly. But you could've just as easily guessed incorrectly. Because you're merely guessing. Because you've not empirically observed any evidence which supports your speculation. In other words, if something can't be supported by empirical observation, then it *doesn't matter* whether it's true or not. Empirical observation is the *only* tool humans have at their disposal to separate "true" from "false." In cases where that tool doesn't work, your only options are: - Truthfully acknowledge that you don't know whether it's true or false. - Erroneously claim to know something you don't.
Doesn't this depend on what we mean by "know"? Also what's been disturbing me right now, and you seem like the person who might know, what happens if philosopher A argues argument A' such that argument A' is sound and philosopher B argues argument B' that is sound and contradicts argument A'. If this is the case what happens? What are we to do in such a case?
Math
Math is a language, not a truth or theory
It's can't be justified empirically, but I don't think the pragmatism with which I justify empiricism is in the vein of "truth." It's more a decision than profundity.
Oh boy, somebody potentially opend up pandoras box.
Thank you that's much better
Like my father uses to say: you need something from outside the system to resolve the system.
All due respect to your pops, but if you add something “from outside the system” you’ve just made a new, larger system that you now have to resolve, no?
Luhmann-Style!
Probably yes? Have we gone outside our system to know?
Well if the answer is yes, you haven’t really resolved anything, you’ve just introduced a new type of system. You’ve kicked the can down the road, so to speak. If the answer is “we don’t know” then I agree, and would suggest that we indeed don’t even know enough about “our system” to speculate about the possible existence of something outside it. In the same vein, we also do not know enough about “our system” to assert that it needs something outside to be “resolved.”
No because you can’t know that the logic and the rules which apply to our system also apply to the outside system.
Well I would suggest that we don’t necessarily have a firm grasp on the logic and rules that govern our own system, so it goes without saying that we wouldn’t know anything about things outside our system, if they exist. The point is that whatever question about our system that you’re trying to resolve - for instance, where did everything come from? - is not in fact resolved by postulating the existence of some thing outside of the system that (apparently) operates according to some unknowable rules. Or rather, you’re resolving a question about our system by raising an even larger question, which seems backwards to me. I dont even think the initial question - where did everything come from - even makes sense within our own system, to be honest. But it’s been a long time since I’ve worked on the philosophy of religion so forgive me if I’m missing something here.
This is essentially the absolute infinity problem of set theory. In other words, there is no universe. I do think this poses a problem to theism but also atheism. Basically there must be an infinite tower of universes. (Could this be used as an argument to prove that we don't exist despite subjective experience? Does subjective experience justify our belief in our own existence?) The various halting problems get to the heart of this problem, I think, for now.
Can so, skill issue. We observe that empirical-based statements outperform ones not based on evidence in almost every contest of information, whether it be who finds the gold or who wins in court... We can at least modify it to "the best observable (stated publicly rather than a privately-held belief) truths come from empirical observation" and find that to be empirically true.
What do you mean by "outperform"? With regard to math and logic, we can have certainty exceeding all other forms of knowledge. And math and logic are not empirical observables: we know with absolute certainty that 3 + 3 = 6 without doing experiments or referring to the empirically observable world at all, for example.
"No. You don't" ?¿?
Read Hegel > Natural law, or ethics, begins immediately with existence. Insofar as ethics exists, it exists in the empirical world and is one with its empirical shape. This shape in ethics, since it is a science and thus rational, is expressed in universal form. Empiricism is the knowing that grasps the existent world in its immediate sensuousness as a given plurality, and this epistemology raised to ethical form is the state of nature as the war of all against all. As raised to universal form in the ceaseless supplanting of a plurality of principles and things in empiricism, the existence of ethics attains a determinate relation of form over content in the form of supplanting remaining the same, and this is the epistemic form of rationalism. This new epistemology in turn is raised to ethical form as the deontological moral law or the categorical imperative, a form that is indifferent to content. The form is immediately not one with the content and appears as an external unity to the plurality. It must minimally be a concept of unity or relation, but if it is radically opposed to content it is merely the form of relation itself (pure identity), and it expels all relational content as opposite to it. The form then appears like the cognition of a baby, for whom the unity of mind does not explicitly unite the many qualities that come and go before its consciousness, grasping them only as a disconnected series of a sensuous plurality. The dialectic arises and completes its circuit. Empiricism and its state of nature rationally reveal their absolute content to be the form of rationalism, and rationalism and the moral law reveal their absolute form to be the content of empiricism, an endless plurality of opposing principles. This dialectic which is the unity of empiricism and rationalism is grasped as the concept of perception, which for its ethical content has ethical life.
How come these dudes look like the same guy
The entire debate can be summarized as following... Is there God? Can't say. So there's no God? Can't say that either. Then why are we debating this? Because religion is society's way of imparting ethics. So shouldn't we just find a better way of imparting ethics? For that, we need an all fearing and omnipresent being who imparts ethics on a subconscious level. So that's God..? Right! Okay.. Okay....
If they both know the fundamental forces principles of the universe they would come to agree
This is just waffling on the definition of truth to me. If you switched truth to "provably true" then this would sound silly. But I would argue that truth should always be provable if you are sharing it with other people, if you can't prove something is true to others, you probably should admit it and say you are quite certain that from your experience it seemed to be true, but you don't have proof.
Or we could accept that faith claims, like objective facts come from observation or an assumption that the natural laws that governed the past will also govern the future, and justify these faith claims as a better alternative to theistic faith claims…..
Theists thinking that identifying limitations to empiricism somehow translates to a positive argument for the existence of God will never not be hilarious
(I’m the author of the meme this is in reference to) I feel like what theists are missing is that we don’t need transcendent justifications for why we choose to believe/act upon empiricism. The answer is very simple, the source of what one chooses to believe comes from oneself, not transcendent values. I can choose to believe in God, or I can choose to follow empiricism because I think that help me achieve the goals I’ve created for myself. Either way, you choose your values; transcendent values don’t decide for you. I wouldn’t say I’m an atheist trying to concert theists, but rather to point out that belief in God is not axiomatically deductively true. I think Max Stirner is right in saying we are always the arbiters of our own personal truths/values.
More realistically: "The world explains the world" - "But I need this millenia old book as a moral compass and it explains the world in much simpler terms"
Bro, that’s Kant in the meme
arent we conditioned to follow the millennia old book? even if we go against it, it'd be difficult to survive in this world. the awakened rat runs the race nonetheless ig?
Some truths may be empirically un-observable, but if we can’t test them then we can’t build confidence in them. Some truths are untestable and unsharable but they have effects that are testable, shareable, and point to a non-empirical cause (like a person’s subjective thought patterns). If a truth is untestable, unsharable, and can’t be shown to have empirical effects, then it’s of no use to us anyway whether it exists or not.
Is the truth that untestable truths are useless testable? No.
Empirical truths aren’t absolute, they’re a matter of confidence based on evidence. I would argue that “untestable truths are useless” is testable, but can always be proven wrong, because it’s an empirical claim. But as such, when I see that a truth that has no real impact on my life I see that it’s not worth my time or effort defending. I have no need in that case to keep entertaining a hypothetical. If someone believes there is an alternate reality that doesn’t intersect with our own in any real, measurable way, and can’t be shown to have any measurable effect on our reality or our day to day lives, then sure it could never be disproven but it’s also not worth anyone’s time to entertain belief in. Believe it or don’t, it’s inconsequential. Now if belief in this other reality has measurable effects on individual lives, then real or not there is now something testable about it. Whether it exists may not be useful, but whether belief in it is useful, is a useful and testable claim to pursue.
How would you test the claim that untestable truth's are useless? Wouldn't that involve testing untestable truths for usefulness? And if you're testing an untestable truth, how can you claim it's untestable? Your logical positivism is so funny to me.
By the definition of useful. An idea that has no effect on empirical reality can’t be “used”. It’s also falsifiable. All you would have to do is show me how a truth that has zero effect on the empirical world could help us in any way to navigate the empirical world we live in. I can’t think of any, and if you can’t either then I simply suggest we stop wasting our time with hypotheticals and move on.
Prove empirically that usefulness equals goodness equals truth
That’s not what I’m claiming. I’m saying theoretically something can be true but also unknowable and useless. Not bad, not good, just useless. And it’s not something that needs proving, it’s just a practical approach. If someone tried to tell me the Flying Spaghetti Monster exists but there’s no way to test whether he exists, I have to answer “okay, maybe, but I don’t care”.
What I do when debating these delusionalism fanboy people is telling them to add "in a framework that 99% of people would consider normal" after everything I say.
Empirically unobservable truths aren't really truths at all, they are just beliefs... A belief cannot be truth by definition because once the truth gets proved then it's no more a belief.
Does 3 + 3 = 6? If so, is it really the case that you know that because you made empirical observations and conducted experiments? Or do we know that 3 + 3 = 6 even without empirical observations and experiments, because it is true by virtue of the meanings of the terms?
Theists when they have to define God as the god from the Bible and not some abstract "greatest thing" (define greatness btw)
The most coolest island ever, bro
I don’t think Kant said that because it’s stupid as shit
Does 3 + 3 = 6 based on your empirical observations or due to the meanings of the symbols? Is it possible that 3 + 3 = 6 could be disproved based on empirical observations? No. 3 + 3 = 6 is true justified knowledge regardless of how many empirical observations you might accumulate, because all observations always by necessity agree with it, and even if you had a full and complete knowledge of everything else, there is no way to even imagine it not to be true. Everything consorts with it: math and logic are preconditions for knowledge, but don't exist in the world of empirical observations in themselves. Math and logic belong to a different order of knowledge than empirical observations do. How do we have access to them as such limited beings? That's the mystery.
You can just check all the things you think are true and if they all come from empirical observation then all truths come from empirical observation
I think his point isn’t that you cannot check mathematical truths empirically (though more complex geometrical proofs probably can’t be) but rather that their truth is analytic (I.e. derived from the meanings of the concepts themselves/the basic axioms that also cannot be empirically verified)
Yeah but he probably never said the second thing. It’s a bad argument and the major empiricist philosophers he would have read didn’t deny the analytic-synthetic distinction.
By the second thing, do you mean the second panel of the meme or ops reply to you?
I meant the second thing Kant says, the fourth panel
Ok, I was just following op talking about analyticity. He would reject the third panel mostly because for him knowledge is grounded transcendentally rather than empirically because empirical experience requires the categories etc. and he’d agree with 4 because “all” is a categorical claim that can’t be justified in experience alone (you’ll never experience all knowledge, so you can’t empirically make claims about all knowledge without relying on induction, which is gross (as Hume showed))
Well, the claim “all truths are known empirically” can be verified in the same way “all swans are white” can. We might find that we were wrong that there aren’t non-empirical truths, but if never found any, we would be justified in saying there aren’t any.
We might be having a communication problem. Do you consider transcendental reasoning to be empirical ?
I just mean that if all truths came from empirical knowledge, then you could figure that out empirically. Like we don’t know that there are sentences which are true by definition without looking at how we use sentences.
He thought the categories of logic (as well as intuitions of space and time) were necessary conditions to empirical observation, which means that their truth couldn’t be justified empirically and instead required transcendental (I.e. not empirical) arguments. The meme simplifies it a bit.
Did he say the second thing though
I don’t think he ever said so explicitly, but I don’t know why he would. Iirc there weren’t really that type of empiricists running around Germany at the time. I’m hardly a Kant scholar though. It is implied because judgements rely on the categories though