Free will Argument against Divine Providence

[bennyboy]

Reality is one thing, and proving that your idea represents it is quite another. You are fond of the word "evidence," and avoid the word "proof" like the plague, for obvious reasons: philosophical positions cannot be proven in the way that you would normally require positions to be proven: through empirical observations which can be shared with others.

Don't believe me? What observations can you use to prove that your observations represent reality?

You seem to be very, very confused about a lot of philosophical concepts. Try understanding them before blindly using them in whatever way seems okay.

I use the words proof and evidence in two different contexts - philosophical and scientific. Within philosophy, you use logic and deductive reasoning - here, the proof is possible. Within science, you use empirical observation and inductive reasoning - here only evidence is possible. Even in simultaneous application of these two fields of study, you have to be careful to keep the lines of reasoning separate. Therefore, a statement like "prove" your position through "empirical observation" is simply idiotic.

That's quite the lecture for someone in a philosophy thread who has appealed to evidence (or a lack of it) perhaps a dozen times, in order to shift the BOP. You keep bringing up evidence, and I keep saying that none if it is sufficient to prove the mind even exists.

As for not being able to "prove" things through evidence-- baloney. I can prove that people can fly in the air by showing you a plane. You wouldn't say, "Hrrrm. It appears the evidence supports the hypthesis that people can fly," because in this case, the evidence is sufficiently strong as to consitute proof. Similarly, I would take the observation of the act of someone sailing completely around the world as proof that it wasn't flat. Unless, of course, I was more interested in pedantic semantics than in talking about the subject at hand.

So, either your question should be "What logical reasoning can you use to prove that your observations represent reality?" or "What observations can you use as evidence to support your position that your observations represent reality?" - keep that difference in mind - don't make me keep correcting you.

Now, would you like to restate the question in a sensible form or do you insist in keeping it nonsensical and ask me to answer that?

Did it occur to you that since I've stated many times that accepting the existence of the subjective (i.e. actually experiencing) mind at all is a PHILOSOPHICAL position, that I'm refuting your repeated fall-back position of appealing to evidence when you can't provide a philosophical proof? That's why the post you just quoted used the word "you." I didn't mean that in the general sense of "one." I meant it as in "you, genkaus."

So, I assume you can talk to fishes and bugs and other assorted members of the animal kingdom - I mean, how else are you to even start justifying that these creatures are subjectively experiencing their environment?

Forget other animals, and let's start with people. As I've already said, the step from solipsism to accepting that other people exist and experience as I do is a philosophical assumption, and no empirical evidence is sufficient to constitute proof (yeah, I said it).

No, we don't. That's the beauty of CyberScientist 3000. I just have to feed in a hypothesis - the CyberScientist will observe and examine any prior studies on the subject, devise experimental criteria for the hypothesis, conduct the experiment, analyze the results, categorize them as evidence for or against the hypothesis and record the results for other applications to observe. The reason why this would work is because observation does not require experience and awareness does not require sentience.

And nobody will ever know the result, and be able either to confirm or disprove their scientific hypotheses.

Call it "boobeldyboo" if you want. Without a sentient mind to see the green-ness, or to draw the idea of "solidity" from a particular density or arrangment of wave function in space, entity words like "tree" are meaningless.

Wrong again - what is required is a mind capable of conceptualization, not sentience. You are, once again getting confused between different aspects of consciousness.

Again, call it "boobeldyboo" if you want. Absent the ability to actually experience things, rather than just process data, these entity words are meaningless.

I say "evidence" because, as I clarified earlier, we are talking about conclusions that we can draw from empirical observation. [. . .]
And I am saying that there is no information of any kind that humans cannot observe. The evidence for this is that we've been able to observe many different kinds of information - even the ones beyond our perceptual limitations.

Right. So you are using the fact that we can observe some kinds of information as evidence that we can observe all kinds of information. The worm could do the same thing-- and he'd be wrong.

____

Okay, I have sufficient evidence to prove that my initial instinct to walk away from this discussion was correct. We're both getting a little testy, and we're not really making any headway. If I'm going to pwn or get pwned as a matter of pride, I'd rather do it with better visuals, perhaps in the land of Norrath.

Last word on this stream of ideas goes to you. I'll be making comments about the Sam Harris video, which is very interesting indeed, and I'm sure you and I will be back at it again in a few days.