RE: Argument against atheism
December 24, 2011 at 10:41 pm
(This post was last modified: December 24, 2011 at 11:56 pm by Perhaps.)
(December 24, 2011 at 4:35 pm)Rhythm Wrote:(December 24, 2011 at 3:03 pm)Perhaps Wrote: This is the perfect time for me to make my point, ever more clear.
There are two types of assumptions made in life. Those of axioms - made without our choice, they simply are self-evidently true, and form all other 'truths'. The other is those of knowledge assumptions - like the one I made about the consciousness of mollusks.
I am arguing the former, and you are arguing the later. Science, your words, our discussion, these thoughts, would not make sense without the assumed axiom that reason is the source of truth. None of them would exist if the axiom: I exist was not true. Once these are established, all thoughts are sensible if they apply reason, our discussion is sensible if it applies reason, your words are sensible if they apply reason, and science is sensible if it applies reason.
What you have a problem with, as do I, is when people make assumptions about the way the world works (which is the field of science) and assert them as truths. If I want to know how the world works I will refer to science, but if I want to know why the world works I will refer to philosophy. Science is the most useful tool we have at our dispense, but it is limited by our understanding of self.
I hope that made my point a little more clear. I think we agree, we're just referring to two different concepts and posing them against each other, when we really just need to realize that they are two different concepts.
An axiom is nothing more than an assumption which has been transformed into a monument to itself. We always have a choice as to whether or not we do this. Nothing is "self evident" if we're going to perform due diligence in the search for knowledge. I have yet to see an assumption, elevated to axiom, that must be accepted or discarded on nothing more than a whim, that we have no choice but to accept (though I've seen plenty that people have begged me to accept, demanded that I must accept, argued that I secretly do accept.....). Even the "axiom" that reason is the source of knowledge makes predictions which can be tested. It produces results. If it did not, there would be no such "axiom". If an axiom is a "take it or leave it" proposal, in and of itself, then the use of reason is no such thing. Simply because we can measure it by the results it brings. I needn't explain how reason works, I don't even need to know why reason works, to see the results. Again, it may be that something other than reason is at play, and that our use of reason leverages this instead of the elaborate system that we have defined as reason. It still works. It works if our existence is illusory, it works if our existence is an objective reality, and it works until it doesn't. We simply haven't found an instance (yet) where it fails to produce results (except in those instance where we discovered the "reasoning" we were using did not produce results, or produced results which were contradictory to themselves....then decided to call this line of reasoning "invalid", fallacy, etc. Simply put, our system of knowledge began with assumptions, but the train has long since left that station.
You're just repeating yourself here, you've shown no results. This is exactly what I'm criticizing, so you'll have to excuse me if I feel that the olive branch being offered here is simply a trojan horse (even if you don't intend it to be). Ive explained to you exactly why our body of knowledge would be un-phased if your existence was illusory, because it still produces results, even if this were true. The illusion called science works within the illusion called existence. I'm not even arguing that we do exist here. I'm accepting your argument as though it were factually accurate in every particular and explaining to you that it changes nothing with regards to the results. Even if our discussion were not sensible, even if reason were unreasonable (a meaningless statement if ever there was one) even if the reasoning leveraged by science was an illusion.......it still produces results.
Science does not make assumptions and then assert them as truths. Scientists make assumptions (sometimes), which then have to be verified by results, repeated, put through the grinder, subject to falsification, and then gives a stamp of provisional certainty, not truth, to it's conclusions. I'm not even sure you're clear in your own thoughts here. If you want to know why the world works? Why does a piston engine work? Scientific explanation for that. Why does combustion work? Scientific explanation for that. Why is there such a thing as combustion? Scientific explanation for that. Why/how is again you choosing to begin your statement with a fuzzy distinction, how very philosophic of you. There will eventually be a break in the chain, where we must simply say "We have no clue" but philosophy is incapable of going further there as well, and never made it as deep down the chain in the first place. Science attempts to safeguard itself against our understanding of ourselves, philosophy just keeps yanking it's dick as though it were somehow important simply because it comes from us, simply because we have thoughts. Well, that's been shown to be a terrible mistake time and time again. It's not as though science does not leverage philosophy, logic. It simply demands one more thing, evidence. This was a turning point for our species; realizing that our thoughts (and thought itself) may not be an accurate representation of reality, and something else was required if we wished to go any farther, or make corrections to the conclusions or previous systems had made. We did this because they were no longer working, no longer producing results. We had hit a wall. Even in your final statement here you've expressed an assumption where I have not, an axiom where I have none. You have assumed that there is a "why" beyond the "how". Something more than what can be demonstrated. Well, lets see some results from this assumption? Is this an axiom? Must I take it or leave it? I think not.
Now, I could talk your ear off about science, but in the end this is diversionary. Do you have any axioms for me to consider which do not fail as axioms by definition? Do you have any axioms which do fit the definition and have produced results? I'll toss you a link, as I'm pretty sure that this would do more than the pages of convo we've had thusfar. Please don't attempt to twist this into an axiom, as I have a great respect for this concept and utilize it, again, because it has produced results. You might argue that this was a product of philosophy, of an assumption, and once upon a time that was definitely true. As I mentioned above, the train has left that station. It's not something that I agree with in every particular. But it's a pretty good summary of where I'm coming from.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Positivism
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Critical_rationalism
(notice that the one is a criticism of the other in many areas, and I'm definitely fond of both, I hope that you refrain from making some comparison to religion in my thoughts going forward, by insinuating that I take things as axioms, that I move forward from assumptions without questioning them because they cannot be questioned, as though I were adhering to some sort of dogma, that I had faith in some fundamental assumption that you believe science or empiricism could not operate without. I have to tell you, to me, there is no greater insult.)
Perhaps this quote can help you better understand...
"...With or without rational rules of thought to guide the selection process, these stories were heavily connected to the notion of cause, as the world in which individual and tribe lived has always provided differential rewards in terms of survival and reproductive success on the basis of how effectively the ``magic'' of its underlying causality has been mastered.
Note well that there is something startling about the discovery of causality and its close friend, induction. Inductive reason in general is a deductive fallacy - in fact the one labelled post hoc, ergo propter hoc. Loosely translated, this means: ``after this, therefore because of this''. It may be more familiar in the words of a common litany taught in any good course on statistics: correlation is not causality! Just because you always see two events in close proximity, with one following the other in time, does not logically mean that the former ``causes'' the latter. Which is a shame because, as we shall see, correlation is all we've got. Ever.
It's even more of a shame, because one can start with a tiny handful of very plausible axioms and derive induction as a quantitative system of contingent probabilistic logic, and show that deductive logic is a limiting case of this system, one that is effectively never realized in nature. In other words, as a means towards knowledge of the real world, it turns out that it is deductive logic that is the ``fallacy'', in that deductive truth is forever beyond our grasp. When we use it we are basically using inductive logic where we really really believe that our premises are true and assign them a prior probability of being true that approaches 1. But more on this later, when we treat the amazing work of Richard Cox and E. T. Jaynes.
Evolution, on the other hand, doesn't give a rat's furry ass about ``valid'' or ``invalid'', or more properly ``conditional truth''. All it cares1.12 about is whether or not a behavior improves one's chances at survival and reproduction, and humans, dogs, cats, and chimpanzees that for whatever reason acted as if correlation is causality tended to outlive those that didn't. Indeed, we rank the ``intelligence'' of animals almost exclusively on the basis of how well they recognize this basic principle at a level beyond instinct (so that they can learn from their experiences).
So behaving as if induction works and the environment is causal have always been favored by natural selection at so very many levels. We are literally evolved to look for causal (or at least associative) patterns and form generalizations even though doing so is completely irrational from a deductive point of view. By golly gosh it works though, even in subjects like mathematics where we are traditionally (and badly) taught that inductive reasoning of this sort is supposed to play no role."
Credit:
http://www.phy.duke.edu/~rgb/Philosophy/...s_Big.html
Furthermore:
"When it comes right down to it, Truth is pretty much Truthiness. Truthiness is a quality of knowledge assigned on the basis of intuition or instinct - ``from the gut'' - instead of on the basis of rigorous logical analysis and connection to things like facts. Very shortly we'll have you hanging out over the existential Pit of Despair, where we will make the true but unprovable assertion that logical analysis and what we consider to be ``facts'' are inventions of our intuition, possibly supported by our instincts, and hence logical analysis itself is illogical. With that understood2.22 we will now proceed to analyze the truthiness of the Laws of Thought.
What kind of beast, we might start by asking, are these Laws? No matter how self-evidently correct you might imagine them to be, ultimately they are semantic assertions in a language, and (like thought itself) exist only in the realm of our imaginations. To ``do'' anything with them we must imagine a set of definitions and a formal reasoning process in a symbolic language in which the Laws are assumed to be constraints on the symbolic objects about which we wish to reason. Ultimately, such an imaginary reasoning process will take a given set of imagined (and hence conditionally true) premises and reason ``correctly'' according to the rules to some given (necessarily conditional) conclusion, where we defer until later just what this process is and how it works.
Since we are making the whole thing up in our heads, we can therefore perfectly reasonably ask whether or not we can equally well think up other definitions and rules for a a symbolic reasoning process constituting Laws of Thought in which the imagined objects of the reasoning process are not required to strictly either ``be'' exclusively or ``not be'', with no middle ground possible. Maybe we can, maybe we can't, but there is no harm in trying.
Although we won't discuss the details until later, we already have what we need to develop the primary ideas of this book, neatly captured in the observation that the process is imaginary and truths are at best conditional. This means that there is a fundamental rational disconnect between abstract rational systems and the real world that can only be bridged by means of a system of axioms that permits us to relate our symbolic conclusions to our instantaneous experience."
Credit:
http://www.phy.duke.edu/~rgb/Philosophy/..._Sets.html
If you wish me to provide you with axioms which cannot be disproved, here they are. These are objectivist axioms:
1.) I (you) exist. - In order to refute this statement, one must assume it is true.
2.) Something exists. - In order to refute this statement, one must assume it is true.
3.) Existence exists. - In order to refute this statement, one must assume the two prior axioms are true.
There is only one solipsistic axiom:
1.) The conscience exists.
Brevity is the soul of wit.
