RE: Roger Penrose is a hack
June 2, 2020 at 1:22 pm
(This post was last modified: June 2, 2020 at 1:36 pm by The Grand Nudger.)
The five minute old universe is thoroughly silly. Suppose it was five minutes old..but for whatever reason and however it came to be this way...it appeared to all the world and had every detail in common with a much older universe.
The setup is claiming that no relevant fact which informs the conclusion of old age is false, and then quixotically asking us to consider that the conclusion is..nevertheless..false. Fine...but we're being asked to prove something when, if this could be the case, nothing could be proven.
It asks us to consider the possibility that even when we're in the possession of sound and true premises, and we use those premises in a valid form, we still couldn't trust the conclusion. A complete retreat into irrationalism cannot make demands of rational processes, because it does not believe in rational processes, or..indeed...so much as a rationally intelligible universe.
The unreliability of a rational process to reach true conclusions in an irrational universe is uninformative, and would be expected. Rationally speaking, ofc, but since we've dispensed with all reason.......
I'd even say that the notion is far more harmful to god beliefs than anything else, particularly when the believer thinks that all evidence points to some fairy.
What, all of the evidence that could have been manufactured five minutes ago and whose conclusions still would not be true even if every detail were?
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The setup is claiming that no relevant fact which informs the conclusion of old age is false, and then quixotically asking us to consider that the conclusion is..nevertheless..false. Fine...but we're being asked to prove something when, if this could be the case, nothing could be proven.
It asks us to consider the possibility that even when we're in the possession of sound and true premises, and we use those premises in a valid form, we still couldn't trust the conclusion. A complete retreat into irrationalism cannot make demands of rational processes, because it does not believe in rational processes, or..indeed...so much as a rationally intelligible universe.
The unreliability of a rational process to reach true conclusions in an irrational universe is uninformative, and would be expected. Rationally speaking, ofc, but since we've dispensed with all reason.......
I'd even say that the notion is far more harmful to god beliefs than anything else, particularly when the believer thinks that all evidence points to some fairy.
What, all of the evidence that could have been manufactured five minutes ago and whose conclusions still would not be true even if every detail were?
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