More Religious Nutters

[Agathon]

Originally posted by Elok

A causal relation which makes fear useful and therefore logical.

That's not an accepted use of the term "logical".

I do not admit that possibility.

How can you not admit it? Hope does not independently exist outside the human mind, neither does fear. Nor do the rules of chess, or countless other ideas we have.

...yes it is. If there are two horses and another comes along to join them, that's your number three right there. "Three wonderful horses, hahaha I love it," as The Count says.

But when mathematicians talk about numbers, they are not talking about horses or apples, but about abstract concepts. What is referred to by "3" in "3+3=6" is a distinct entity in some way or other from a particular group of horses.

I'm pretty sure that, too, is a nonsensical question. You couldn't get a meaningful probability unless you had a number X of documented cases of apples or other things floating in midair and knew that Y number of cases were of gravity being false, in which case you could say that there was a Y in X likelihood...but that sounds idiotic for so many reasons: because theories are not supposed to change truth values from case to case; because you'd need to know the "truth" of gravity in each documented case, which is under contest here, to determine the odds in the first place...

Again, I am not discussing the likelihood of a particular event, but the truth of a theory. Rational people would agree that floating apples should prompt a revision to our theory of gravity, and perhaps a complete rejection of it. After all, a theory that is immune to evidence is not really a scientific theory, and the TOG tells us that apples shouldn't float unless they are in outer space.

I thought I did: they could come up with an explanation that satisfied a scientist, but it would probably not impress me. It's just that these questions are too complex for straightforward yes-or-no answers, and we think very differently, it seems.

Yes, I happen to think that the questions are quite simple. The first is whether it is possible for their to be mental events that have no external correlates. The answer is obviously yes due to the existence of hallucinations, emotions, etc. So your claim that a mental experience of God's reality proves by itself the existence of God requires more explanation. Your own God Helmet example counts against it.

The second question is the harder one. Given the possibility that mental events with no external correlates can exist, how can we distinguish between the ones that do and the ones that don't?

In other words, I'm asking you what evidence you can appeal to in order to demonstrate that your impression of God's reality is kataleptic and not to be discounted as illusory. If you want me to give an answer why I think that we should discount it as illusory, then I will give you one, as soon as you answer my question.

I think this is a completely fair and reasonable question to ask someone who is asserting God's existence on the basis of mystical experience. Don't you?

[Elok]

I don't mean to imply that God Helmets "prove" anything in a hard sense, just that, if they indicate anything about the question of God, it would seem to be more in my favor than yours. I admit it could be argued either way, and one piece of evidence does not constitute proof in any case.

I've already indicated that your claims about hallucinations, emotions, etc. are complete hogwash to me. You can't hallucinate something that doesn't exist in some form or forms, however much you mix it up, and of course emotions and other abstract concepts do not exist as objects, but they correspond to reality in some way. The rules of chess describe the different movement capabilities of troops on a battlefield, albeit in a highly stylized fashion.

Actually, I suppose you can invent shapes not found in nature (at least, not in common experience), but that doesn't impress me much as new shapes can be invented by looking at how the old ones are constructed and extrapolating geometric rules, playing with them...

We're not getting anywhere with this. Can we just drop it?

[Agathon]

Originally posted by Elok
I don't mean to imply that God Helmets "prove" anything in a hard sense, just that, if they indicate anything about the question of God, it would seem to be more in my favor than yours. I admit it could be argued either way, and one piece of evidence does not constitute proof in any case.

The possibility of God Helmets proves that you cannot claim as a certainty that God exists based on some sort of mystical experience.

If you want to claim that such experiences give you a good enough reason to demonstrate that God exists, then you have to show why God is a better explanation for the existence of these experiences than some other explanation which doesn't involve God (such as an evolutionary explanation).

So far you haven't done that, which means your argument fails as it stands.

I've already indicated that your claims about hallucinations, emotions, etc. are complete hogwash to me. You can't hallucinate something that doesn't exist in some form or forms, however much you mix it up,

Prove it. There's no reason why stimulation of the brain should not cause us to have experiences that are unlike anything we normally see. The Humean empiricism you are relying on here is old hat since neuroscience got going.

and of course emotions and other abstract concepts do not exist as objects, but they correspond to reality in some way.

They have a causal relationship with reality, but not a representational relationship. This does your argument no good, since mystical experiences may have similar causal relationships to reality (or merely intra brain causation) without representing anything real outside our own consciousness.

I can see a pink elephant either because there is really one there, or because someone gave me LSD. In both cases my mental state is caused by an external influence, but only in one case does it represent anything accurately.

The rules of chess describe the different movement capabilities of troops on a battlefield, albeit in a highly stylized fashion.

Not in any meaningful sense. What about draughts?

We're not getting anywhere with this. Can we just drop it?

We aren't getting anywhere, because you refuse to answer simple questions in addition to confusing causation and representation. You are the one who claimed that mysticism was a reasonable justification for belief in God, not me. So far you haven't done much to prove it to a sceptical audience.

[Agathon]

Originally posted by Elok
Okay, so you have poor reading comprehension and/or analytic skills. That, too, is your problem.

EDIT to explain and forestall protests (hopefully): I have just spent like a dozen posts establishing that there is no evidence in the article that these people believe their phone number will do them actual harm, and in fact some evidence against that reading. They just don't like being represented by the number, AFAICT. Hence your first point is COMPLETELY IRRELEVANT.

As to the second, the truth or falsehood of the holocaust/bible is also COMPLETELY IRRELEVANT to this argument. My whole point in that analogy was that reluctance to be associated with a well-known symbol of evil is not a form of superstition. The origin of the symbol in question is totally tangential. And if you think their reluctance is an overreaction, that's a whole other argument, also having nothing to do with my point.

In conclusion: Read. Reread. Then, and only then, respond. And (I cannot emphasize this enough): COMPLETELY! IRRELEVANT!

Just quoting this for fun.

Oh, and what about colour, Elok? Colour is a secondary quality: it doesn't exist in things, but only in our perceptions of them.

[Perfection]

Originally posted by Elok
I don't mean to imply that God Helmets "prove" anything in a hard sense, just that, if they indicate anything about the question of God, it would seem to be more in my favor than yours. I admit it could be argued either way, and one piece of evidence does not constitute proof in any case.

I've already indicated that your claims about hallucinations, emotions, etc. are complete hogwash to me. You can't hallucinate something that doesn't exist in some form or forms, however much you mix it up, and of course emotions and other abstract concepts do not exist as objects, but they correspond to reality in some way. The rules of chess describe the different movement capabilities of troops on a battlefield, albeit in a highly stylized fashion.

So why can't the concept of God be an amalgam of a bunch of things that exist in external reality sort of like a unicorn, ghost, or Darth Vader?

[Agathon]

Originally posted by Perfection

So why can't the concept of God be an amalgam of a bunch of things that exist in external reality sort of like a unicorn, ghost, or Darth Vader?

It could be, but you get an even stronger (and more scientifically respectable) argument if you simply deny the Humean thesis.

[Perfection]

Originally posted by Agathon
It could be, but you get an even stronger (and more scientifically respectable) argument if you simply deny the Humean thesis.

What the greasy poop is that?

I should note that I'm not accepting Elok's claim of that concepts must always have some correspondence to external reality, I just don't feel like looking at another one of his tortured ways of corresponding concepts to reality and am trying another objection.

[Agathon]

Originally posted by Perfection
What the greasy poop is that?

It's the claim that our ideas are copies of sense impressions. So you have a sense impression of red, and it is copied into your mind like an impression made into a wax tablet.

I guess it's no worse than other folk theories of the mind, but it suffers from numerous problems, one being that if we opened up your skull, there would be nothing but grey gunge inside and no ideas.

The other problem is that, if mental states are brain states, you don't seem to need anything really red to produce the brain state. Electrical stimulation of the brain could conceivably produce the same effect.

In short, there's no reason to believe that our concepts have to copy or image real things in the world, nor that the limits of our conceptualizing are the limits of the world, or that the causes of our concepts must be external. Claims about the relation between the brain and the world are best left to science to discover.

We tend to struggle with ordinary language talk about the mind and mental states, because it predates modern discoveries about the brain.

[Fake Boris]

Exactly, Agathon. If everything is just a brain state, then God may "exist", in the same way Beauty or Love do.

[Agathon]

Originally posted by Oncle Boris
Exactly, Agathon. If everything is just a brain state, then God may "exist", in the same way Beauty or Love do.

Except that those who believe take "God" to refer to a mind independent entity. If you want to make God like unicorns, it's fine by me.

Religion is bull**** on so many levels it's hard to know where to start. For example, how can anyone believe in Christianity when the evidence for Jesus' life is so thin that there's almost no reason to believe that he said or did any of the **** attributed to him.

It's not just that we are supposed to believe preposterous things, like a dude walking on water, but that the actual historical evidence for it just isn't there. In the end it makes about as much sense as Joe Smith digging up a gold book on some random hill, when everyone knows that he was just looking for a way to persuade his wife to let him **** around.

[Elok]

For crying...we're not getting anywhere because you talk and think like a philosopher, while I don't. I don't believe in your whole discipline, any more than you believe in my religion. It's useless to try and make me talk about external correlates and objective reality. I'm just a poor, naive empiricist or Humean or whatever (is "Humean" a typo of "human?" Y'know, as opposed to "android?"). Of course my conceptions are "tortured"; I'm not used to trying to fit all of human experience into your rigid boxes like different-sized shoes. I used to be good at pretending it made sense, but I've been out of school for a year now and out of practice. And now I'm out of patience.

P.S. Reread what I said about not claiming to "prove" anything.

[Perfection]

Why the philosophy hate, Elok?

[Wezil]

He's just trolling filosophers.

[Geronimo]

To be fair...what makes philosophy any more valid or even useful than religion?

[Kuciwalker]

Oh, and what about colour, Elok? Colour is a secondary quality: it doesn't exist in things, but only in our perceptions of them.

Sure it does. I can measure the color of an object without even illuminating it [with visible radiation].