(April 25, 2015 at 5:29 pm)Nestor Wrote: They're non-empirical because, per the standard definition, the "empirical" is "based on, concerned with, or verifiable by observation or experience rather than theory or pure logic." Rationalism relies on the pure abstractions of the intellect to formulate conceptions of truth while strict empiricism looks exclusively to the objects of experience in its determinations. The former begins with the whole and works its way down to the parts; the latter starts with the parts and works towards the whole. Obviously, the two approaches or aspects of reality are relevant to all of our inquiries and neither is fruitful in the extreme if it is to the exclusion of the other. Mathematics is concerned with numbers, which are objects of thought and never verifiable by direct experience, except to the extent which bodily magnitudes are subjected to the rules of addition and division, and the debate as to whether numbers are properties of the objects themselves, an invention of the human mind, or of an abstract (some might say divine, or metaphysical) realm only accessible in thought, rages on since the early days of the Greeks' "golden age," and most notably in the writings of Aristotle and his teacher, Plato.
Mybold
I think I see the point. But, being a rigid materialist, I don't see there being anything there which is in principle not subject to an empirical methodology. Just that one has not yet been implemented to successfully explain thought. Suppose that one can be found in which thought is reproducibly explained as patterns of ion density in bi-lipid membranes (with some support structure and energy flow guiding bits), all of which is material and all of which is subject to empirical investigation. At that point, does what was previously transcendent, mathematics, logic or rationality itself, become base? Do rationalism and empiricism then meet in the middle?
So how, exactly, does God know that She's NOT a brain in a vat? 
