RE: Share your worldview?
February 7, 2018 at 9:50 am
(This post was last modified: February 7, 2018 at 10:20 am by The Grand Nudger.)
(February 7, 2018 at 9:12 am)polymath257 Wrote: If you know the mass of Jupiter is NOT 1kg, that doesn't mean the exact mass is knowable. It is possible to have *some* knowledge, but still not have 100% certainty in the value.
It is simply not the case that knowledge is an all-or-nothing proposition. I can know that Jupiter is more massive than Saturn and not know the mass of either. I can know the value of the mass to 3 decimal places, but not to 9. That means the knowledge of the mass is not 100% certain.
But even more, we may be able to say that the data is *consistent* with a zero spatial curvature in the universe and that there are good theoretical reasons to think it is zero, but we still do not have 100% certainty the curvature is zero.
For that matter, unless you can be 100% sure you don't live in the Matrix, you cannot be 100% sure that chair you sit on is real.
Uncertainty is part of living in the real world. ALL measurements have error bars on them.
It means that the truth status of the proposition "The mass of jupiter is 1kg" is knowable. Are you uncertain in that value?
Knowledge is a binary proposition in conditional statements by definition, that's just a function of propositional logic in conditional statements. Your confidence in the underlying assumptions of a conditional statement may not be. If you know that jupiter is more massive than saturn that's another binary proclamation of knowledge, regardless of whether or not you know the exact mass of either. That you don't is two more binary proclamations of knowledge. That uncertainty is part of living in the real world..another binary proclamation of knowledge.
None of these examples of uncertainty, or the acknowledgement that -these- measurements have error bars...however, speak to any point of contention in any propositional statement regarding afterlives. For this reason, in regards to that conditional statement..they are uninformative. Making the entire post a false analogy if leveraged in that regard (also a binary statement of knowledge - of invalid argumentative structure).
Riding over and above and around all of that, is that there is no requirement of complete knowledge in logic in order to determine the truth status of some specific conditional statement. Such a requirement would be irrational, as we can never know if we have such knowledge anyway. We don't know what we don't know. The only point of contention that would be informative..in summary of all of the above..however, is whether or not the truth status of the afterlife proposition is one of those things, or even remotely like the unknown exact mass of a planet.
What do you think? Is the status of human experience beyond death fundamentally unknowable? Are you less than confident in the underlying propositions which describe our understanding of human consciousness? Is an afterlife meaningfully and sufficiently similar to the mass of a planet..such that a valid and informative comparison might be drawn between them..and that some true thing regarding one would be equally true of the other? Did the existence of any listed uncertainty prevent you from making binary proclamations of knowledge, and is your insistence that you do not know the exact mass of some planet anything other than a binary proclamation of knowledge?
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