An atheists guide to reality

[Mystic]

I don't know what you mean by objectively true here. An objective truth is something that is independently true outside of being true subjectively. Now whether you speak of mind existing in the brain or our selves existing as spirit, in either case, that's not objectively true because it depends on the subjective experience of the mind or spirit. If it were objectively true, you could take it out and look at it, show it, and I get the impression that's not what you mean.

Everything depends on the experience of the mind. Everything experienced is relayed to the brain. I don't know why then value of the self cannot be objectively true simply because it's in our minds.

To me, suggesting that value exists in my spirit, a) is invoking a dualist explanation of mind, b) suggests meaning is a thing or a property of a thing, which I deny, and c) is a non-explanation: it's just a shell game to shuttle the problem - meaning - from something you don't know how to explain it with - material - to an imaginary entity that just "magically" has the needed properties. That's not an explanation.

We are talking about value of the self. I do think value is a property of the self. You don't?

That's no better than "Goddidit!" - it can be used to explain anything because it actually explains nothing. In speaking of desirable explanations, there are assorted properties that an explanation can have which determine whether it is a good explanation or a poor explanation. One of these is scope, how large a class of things the explanation covers. "It's magic!" and "Goddidit!" both have infinite scope; they can explain anything. Another property is explanatory power; how much better we understand the how of the phenomenon as a result of the explanation. These two have almost zero explanatory power; you don't understand things any better after the explanation than you did before it. A third characteristic of explanations is how much predictive power they have; if you can predict a lot of future results based on the how of an explanation, it's a good explanation. Again, these two fail miserably, as they yield basically no predictions.


Explanations such as yours, that meaning exists "in the spirit" are akin to the explanations "It's magic!" and "Goddidit!" They can explain anything because they are extremely poor quality explanations. They don't increase our understanding, and they don't yield predictions. It's just a way to pretend to have explained the phenomena without doing any actual explaining. It's hand-waving. It's meaningless. And as a form of dualism, it introduces more problems than it solves.

"It's a property of the spirit" is an explanation, but as an explanation, it's about as worthless as they come.

Sometimes instead of looking of how much an explanation gives pragmatic scientific prediction, we should just look at what explanation is true given what we know and there can also be other benefits to knowing the truth of that explanation.

Also in case of this topic, I was discussing what value of the self would be in absence of a spiritual realm to me (fabrication of the mind).