Occams Hatchet and Is Materialism "Special"
October 5, 2016 at 1:25 pm
(This post was last modified: October 5, 2016 at 1:42 pm by LadyForCamus.)
(October 5, 2016 at 12:00 pm)bennyboy Wrote: Idealism is a good alternative to materialism. So is good, old fashioned, "I don't know" agnosticism. The fact is that 100% of things we experience, whatever might really be behind them, are experiences only. There are not experiences which are movies, or tables, or whatever.
Saying "We don't know, and I don't believe we can" is only a God of the gaps argument if you are making an assertion, and attempting to use the lack of knowledge as positive support for it. Saying, "I don't think that you can know what you claim to know" isn't a God of the gaps argument-- it's just skepticism.
But isn't philosophical idealism as much of an asserted position as materialism by the same metrics? I'm perfectly comfortable with, "I don't know" as an answer to how the brain generates qualia. I'm also comfortable with the idea that because our existence is experiential in nature, we will probably never have "access" to absolute truths. But, it doesn't sound like you're simply saying: "I don't know/we can't know". It sounds like you're saying "we can't know, therefore materialism is eliminated as a possibility." I don't understand how you reached that conclusion, unless I am simply misunderstanding what materialism actually is. (Philosophy is not my niche, lol)
You said:
Quote:The fact is that 100% of things we experience, whatever might really be behind them, are experiences only.
How do you KNOW this "fact"? That doesn't sound like an agnostic position on the nature of reality at all.
Quote:It's it's not reasonable. I don't mean that it's UN-reasonable, either; I mean that you cannot use reason to arrive at that conclusion. The simple fact is that we are using our experiences to draw inferences about reality. But we do not really know where the experiences come from, why or how. Without being able to establish that our faculties are capable of representing truth, we cannot establish that our inferences represent truth, no matter how much we feel that they do.
You really feel that way? That we can't trust our faculties to give us at the very least a rudimentary representation of truth? That we can't even come close? I mean...why even bother with the scientific method at all at that point? Why bother trying to learn about ANYTHING if we're just blindly bumping around in a dark sea with a broken compass? How do you get out of bed every day with that mentality?! [emoji39]
Nay_Sayer: “Nothing is impossible if you dream big enough, or in this case, nothing is impossible if you use a barrel of KY Jelly and a miniature horse.”
Wiser words were never spoken.
Wiser words were never spoken.
