(January 6, 2019 at 1:16 pm)Lek Wrote:

(January 6, 2019 at 9:07 am)unfogged Wrote: What other option provides a reliable method for determining truth?

How about a witness at a trial? 

Simply accepting witness testimony at face value would not be a reliable method of determining truth at all.

Quote:Or do you believe anything based on a logical conclusion or a philosophical reason? 

I believe things based on logical conclusions from the evidence presented.

Quote:Can science view anything in an abstract manner?  How about love and hate?  Are these just the results of chemical reactions in the brain or a mere physical reaction to a stimulus?  Scientism reduces the whole human being and experience down to a chemical level because it can't grasp things like emotions or hope in any way other than a physical testing.  According to science EVERYTHING we think, feel or do -everything we are- is a physical process. Everything about us is nothing but dirt in action.  Sorry bout that.  I guess my nonphysical side got carried away for a second.

We have evidence for the physical processes involved in everything we think, feel, and do. We don't have evidence for any kind of soul which is what you seem to be arguing for. Understanding the physical processes of emotions doesn't detract from the subjective experience in any way and understanding how things work can even increase their value.

(January 5, 2019 at 2:02 pm)Lek Wrote:

(January 6, 2019 at 9:07 am)unfogged Wrote:

(January 5, 2019 at 2:02 pm)Lek Wrote: If you rely solely on science for a determination of truth, then you have put your self in a box.

What other option provides a reliable method for determining truth?

What about a witness ?

And what method is the witness going to use for determining the truth ?
Have you been to a magic show and seen a woman get cut in half ?

Will the witness say he saw a woman cut in half, because in reality a woman didn't get cut in half.
That witness would be wrong because our senses can be fooled.
To determine the truth we must be able to gather & analyze evidence. We must be able to evaluate it using the most modern tools at our disposal.
We also need to be able to repeat the results of any tests that we make to ensure the quality of our results.

Additionally it helps to have others repeat our tests in case we are unconsciously making mistakes or letting our own biases skew our conclusions.

A witness can only tell you what they remember from an event that they saw, heard, felt, smelt or tasted.
Memories can also get mixed up. They aren't a reliable recording device.

A witness cannot tell you how much a bridge weighs.

Without using math, science, technology, rational thought, how are you going to determine the truth ?

How old is that Red Wood tree ? You can't cut it down using any tools. You can't take a core sample.
All you have is your witness looking at the tree.

Will his or her answer be reliable ?
Do you think someone looking at a tree and giving their best GUESS is a good way to determine the truth ?

I guess I just can't settle with the way things seem to be to you all, but I wish you the best.

(January 6, 2019 at 8:43 pm)Lek Wrote: I guess I just can't settle with the way things seem to be to you all, but I wish you the best.

Rational thinking can be difficult at first, but if you give it a try, you'll find the world makes so much more sense.
And when you find something you don't understand, you get to explore that thing and try to figure out how it works.
Some people even dedicate their lives to the betterment of other human beings.

I wish you the best and hope that one day you'll realize that delusion on your shoulder isn't real.
It's just a chip.

(January 6, 2019 at 1:16 pm)Lek Wrote: Can science view anything in an abstract manner?  How about love and hate?  Are these just the results of chemical reactions in the brain or a mere physical reaction to a stimulus? 

What else do you think they are? Angels playing in our heads?
Joy, happiness, love and hate are stimulus of the brains: human and probably the brains of other animal species. Rocks don’t feel joy or jealousy, and mountains do not love. These emotions are intensely real to those who experience them, but they didn’t exist before brains did. And still does this explanation somehow diminishes love? People can't write love letters anymore or poetry? Nonsense.

Or take color. Color is "nothing more" than sunlight breaking and only one color of it being reflected of a surface into our eyes that have receptors and yet people still paint pictures to show how they see light in their own way and for other people to enjoy.
Back in the day when Newton explained the light Goethe was appalled thinking that this somehow destroys the "magic" of the world by explaining the mysterious and he even wrote his own book in which he tried to un-explain light and make it mystical again.
But Goethe's fears were in vain because knowing more about light made us enjoy light even more in numerous ways and devices.

(January 7, 2019 at 4:26 am)Fake Messiah Wrote: Back in the day when Newton explained the light Goethe was appalled thinking that this somehow destroys the "magic" of the world by explaining the mysterious and he even wrote his own book in which he tried to un-explain light and make it mystical again.
But Goethe's fears were in vain because knowing more about light made us enjoy light even more in numerous ways and devices.

This is a false and unfair thing to say about Goethe. 

He had no interest in mystifying things. He wanted to find the truth. 

When new scientific theories and explanations are offered, it is wrong to accept them immediately without challenging them and working hard to confirm or falsify them. We have the advantage, now, of knowing that Newton got most things right. This was not the case in Goethe's time. Nor was Goethe offering some kind of spooky or occult explanation as an alternative. 

Goethe made a huge number of empirical tests about how people perceive color. He gathered data. He refused to offer an overall explanation, or even a real theory (despite the English title of his book on color) but made significant contributions to our understanding of how people perceive color. 

Goethe looked at the experiential or phenomenological aspects of color perception, including how the meat eyeballs that we are equipped with influence what we see. This was not the same as Newton's interest, which was more of a purely physics based, not perceptual view. 

It is true that Goethe was wrong about a number of things in this field. For example, he considered dark to be a thing rather than an absence. To blame him, however, for trying to mystify light is simply false. 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_Colours

(January 7, 2019 at 6:00 am)Belaqua Wrote: He had no interest in mystifying things. He wanted to find the truth.

For some people mysticism is the truth. Goethe did try to mystify it, as that wiki article says, According to Goethe, "Newton's error.. was trusting math over the sensations of his eye."

Yeah, throwing out mathematics out of explanations is mystifying things.

He didn't like the math he wanted to pull it back to experience without explanation For Goethe, light is "the simplest most undivided most homogeneous being that we know. Confronting it is the darkness" I mean "being" - anthropomorphism is practically definition of mysticism.

So no wonder mystic like Rudolf Steiner felt connection to his un-explanation of light.

(January 7, 2019 at 6:23 am)Fake Messiah Wrote:

(January 7, 2019 at 6:00 am)Belaqua Wrote: He had no interest in mystifying things. He wanted to find the truth.

For some people mysticism is the truth. Goethe did try to mystify it, as that wiki article says, According to Goethe, "Newton's error.. was trusting math over the sensations of his eye."

Yeah, throwing out mathematics out of explanations is mystifying things.

He didn't like the math he wanted to pull it back to experience without explanation For Goethe, light is "the simplest most undivided most homogeneous being that we know. Confronting it is the darkness" I mean "being" - anthropomorphism is practically definition of mysticism.

So no wonder mystic like Rudolf Steiner felt connection to his un-explanation of light.

If your empirical observations are at odds with the math, it is reasonable to doubt and look again at the problem. Color is something we experience, and it makes sense to look closely at what this experience tells us. 

In the 18th and early 19th century, the complete mathematization of reality was not yet complete. Our modern approach, which at times seems to suggest that the abstractions of math are more real than the empirical world we observe, is not something that clear thinkers could immediately accept. If people encounter the idea that mathematical abstraction is true and the evidence of our senses is false, it seems at first like mysticism -- that something unreal is truer than the world we see. In this sense, Goethe's preference for experience was anti-mystical. 

"Being" here means existence. As in Heidegger's Being and Time. In German, Sein. (Goethe wrote in German.) Nothing to do with anthropomorphism. 

As for Steiner, Goethe is not responsible for what later people make of his observations. 

Newton was a religious man and had respect for alchemical theory. The fact that he took mysticism seriously is not reason to reject his work overall. In at least one case, his willingness to consider alchemy led him to a correct conclusion. Galileo had been prejudiced against the alchemical idea of "action at a distance." He held to the more mechanical view of the world, and thought that the idea of one object influencing the movement of another without direct contact was silly mysticism. For this reason, he rejected the huge amount of empirical evidence that the moon affects the tides. Newton was more open-minded concerning this non-mechanical action -- at the time considered occult -- and as a result made more progress in this area than Galileo. He made us all accept the alchemical idea of "action at a distance" by re-naming it gravity. 

What we consider science or mysticism was not yet worked out in those days. 

As in nearly all your posts, you over-simplify.

(January 7, 2019 at 7:14 am)Belaqua Wrote: Color is something we experience

Color is more than meets the eye, like different colors have different temperatures.

(January 7, 2019 at 7:14 am)Belaqua Wrote: Newton was a religious man and had respect for alchemical theory. The fact that he took mysticism seriously is not reason to reject his work overall.

Well I did say that people accept Newton's scientific work, but now that you mention his mystical work it is safe to say that his mystical workis not important to anyone (rejected).

When it comes to light Newton did give a scientific theory which Goethe rejected and gave, quoting from that wiki page: It is hard to present Goethe's "theory", since he refrains from setting up any actual theory

So there you go: Newton gave gave a scientific theory which Goethe wanted to substitute with a non-theory. What is there more to say?

(January 7, 2019 at 7:14 am)Belaqua Wrote: As in nearly all your posts, you over-simplify.

Oh you're still thinking about Cathars. I said how during Albigensian Crusade Pope sent his Christian army and his orders to kill thousands of Cathars (like women and children) to which you said it doesn't have to do anything with Christianity but money. There is such a thing as over complicating things like you saying that Pope and Christians don't have to do anything with Christianity -- well, I don't know what that is, is it self delusion, lies or something else, but it ain't the truth.

(January 7, 2019 at 8:07 am)Fake Messiah Wrote: Color is more than meets the eye, like different colors have different temperatures.

Color seems to have different temperatures. It doesn't really. This is experiential, and therefore something Goethe would investigate, not something quantifiable that Newton would measure. 

Quote:So there you go: Newton gave gave a scientific theory which Goethe wanted to substitute with a non-theory. What is there more to say?

He didn't want to substitute a non-theory. He was collecting data for an alternative view and was too careful to say that he had a full theory yet. 

Quote:BelaquaAs in nearly all your posts, you over-simplify.

Oh you're still thinking about Cathars.

No, I was thinking about your assertion that the reason America lacks a sane health insurance system is because there are a lot of Christians there. If you have some empirical evidence for this odd assertion, I'd be interested to hear it.