Is God a logical contradiction?

[Objectivist]

There's a lot of bad philosophy out there, and some of those bad philosophical ideas have wormed their way into the hard sciences and the humanities are riddled with it.  Most people start in midstream with philosophy and take a whole bunch of stuff for granted.  They never examine fundamental principles.  Everyone could benefit from a conceptual understanding of knowledge.  In fact if you want to change the world for the better this is what needs to happen.  Children should be taught what concepts are, how they're formed, how they're validated, what the relationship between concepts and percepts is.  What universality really means.  How concepts are integrated into more abstract concepts.  How to think in terms of essentials.  They should be taught the proper method of induction.  When they get older they should be taught the principle of measurement omission which is the key to understanding universality.  My kids had no trouble understanding these things.  One day my daughter pointed out a stolen concept in something we heard on the radio.  I was so proud.  You want to put a serious dent in racism, Teach an understanding of concepts. The whole time I was in school, both public and in college, I was never taught any of this.  I was never taught how to reason.  I was never even given a definition of reason.  Instead, I was taught what to think and to memorize a bunch of floating abstractions which I promptly forgot because none of it had any connection to reality, no objective meaning.  I wish I had been taught about all this stuff in school.  I would have been philosophically armed against irrational bullshit.  But the last thing the powers that be want is people able to think for themselves.  

 I think the reason this fallacy is so pervasive is that our education system is designed to stunt the conceptual faculty of children.  It's expressly designed to create anti-conceptual, concrete bound mentalities.  

Well, I hope this helps.  I'll be glad to point you to some more detailed information about stolen concepts if you'd like.

I agree with you that philosophy is important; scientists rarely get taught any, or are taught to look down on it. I definitely wish I had a better foundation which is why I'm enrolled in a Cognitive Science program. Cognitive Science is an interdisciplinary approach to cognition, so it incorporates psychology, neuroscience, computer science, and philosophy. We've had philosophy teachers come in and teach us a thing or two about the philosophy of science and the philosophy of mind, and last year I had to take a course on the philosophy of neuroscience specifically. But as you mentioned it feels as if we're starting midstream, and theres a bunch of basic stuff that I feel we should know, but there's just not enough time to learn.

I have a pretty good grasp of psychology and neuroscience; but when it comes to philosophy and computer science its a foreign language to me. That's part of the reason why I was listening to an artificial intelligence podcast interviewing David Chalmers, where they brought up the Simulation Theory.

When I learned how to think in terms of essentials, it was really an eye-opening experience.  Actually, it was life-changing.  Read An Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology.  It will amaze you.  Leonard Peikoff's essay on the analytic-synthetic dichotomy at the end of the book is worth the price of the book alone, all by itself. I think it will help you immensely in your studies in the hard sciences.  I know that I find it much easier to learn new things now.  I wish I had a better grasp of physics, astrophysics and quantum mechanics. Currently, my area of interest is time, like what is it? But alas, I'm so limited in the amount of time I have to study time.  

[John 6IX Breezy]

When I learned how to think in terms of essentials, it was really an eye-opening experience.  Actually, it was life-changing.  Read An Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology.  It will amaze you.  Leonard Peikoff's essay on the analytic-synthetic dichotomy at the end of the book is worth the price of the book alone, all by itself. I think it will help you immensely in your studies in the hard sciences.  I know that I find it much easier to learn new things now.  I wish I had a better grasp of physics, astrophysics and quantum mechanics. Currently, my area of interest is time, like what is it? But alas, I'm so limited in the amount of time I have to study time.  

I found a digital copy of the book and was able to read the first chapter. The part that resonated the most was her explanation of measurement being man-centered; that we understand the universe by viewing it in relation to ourselves. This is what we observe in the brain, for example, with mirror neurons. Our brains use our bodies to form the building blocks with which it understands the actions of others. When it sees someone do something it runs a simulation, it embodies the perception as if it were the one doing it, and its thus able to comprehend it.

Canonical neurons are similar to mirror neurons, except that they activate when you see objects your body can interact with. For example, one set of neurons will activate when you grab something with your whole hand, and also when you see objects than can be grabbed with your whole hand like a ball, or a rock, but not when it sees objects that needs to be finely gasped like a pencil.

[Objectivist]

When I learned how to think in terms of essentials, it was really an eye-opening experience.  Actually, it was life-changing.  Read An Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology.  It will amaze you.  Leonard Peikoff's essay on the analytic-synthetic dichotomy at the end of the book is worth the price of the book alone, all by itself. I think it will help you immensely in your studies in the hard sciences.  I know that I find it much easier to learn new things now.  I wish I had a better grasp of physics, astrophysics and quantum mechanics. Currently, my area of interest is time, like what is it? But alas, I'm so limited in the amount of time I have to study time.  

I found a digital copy of the book and was able to read the first chapter. The part that resonated the most was her explanation of measurement being man-centered; that we understand the universe by viewing it in relation to ourselves. This is what we observe in the brain, for example, with mirror neurons. Our brains use our bodies to form the building blocks with which it understands the actions of others. When it sees someone do something it runs a simulation, it embodies the perception as if it were the one doing it, and its thus able to comprehend it.

Canonical neurons are similar to mirror neurons, except that they activate when you see objects your body can interact with. For example, one set of neurons will activate when you grab something with your whole hand, and also when you see objects than can be grabbed with your whole hand like a ball, or a rock, but not when it sees objects that needs to be finely gasped like a pencil.

That's fascinating.  What about smells?  Do different neurons fire when we smell something pleasant like a slice of Pizza vs. when we smell something rotten or unpleasant like mold, or something else that would be bad for us?

I think you'll also find her ideas about the similarities of concept formation and math interesting.  Both bring a vast amount of data into the range that our senses can deal with.  Think about the vast amount of observations and information contained in E = MC squared.  We translate vast distances into units we can understand such as the foot or yard measure.  The length of the foot or the length of a step is something we can deal with.  a light year is not, until we reduce it to a smaller unit of measurement that we can relate to.  I also find the whole section about the Crow epistemology fascinating.  It turns out Crows can keep track of up to 3 units.  A unit is a member of a group of similar things.  We with our big brains can keep track of 7 or 8.  But consider the concept "man".  It includes every man that has ever lived, will ever live and that lives now.  but we can turn this vast quantity of units into a single unit, the concept "man".  Think about numbers.  If I were to write IIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIII.  At a glance you can't tell how many I's there are but if I write 37 you can.  That's because I've reduced 37 units into two.  What if I were to write down 150,125, 437 Now we're up to 9 units and you have to pause a little, you can't read it at a glance but imagine you had to stop and count all those units if I were to write out that many I's in a row.  It would take weeks or months to count them all.  That's the power of concepts.  They bring the whole universe down to a level our senses can deal with.  We can land a space probe on a comet millions of Kilometers away because of our ability to form concepts.  She wanted to do more work on the relationship between math and concept formation, said there was a lot more to discover but sadly she died before she could do it.  

Think of the LIGO experiment.  Our senses can't detect gravity waves from two neutron stars colliding in another galaxy but because of our ability to conceptualize, we can build a detector that can and can put that into a form of a readout on a screen that is within the range of our senses.  Astonishing!

[John 6IX Breezy]

I don't know too much about smell; I've mostly focused on vision. But if there's any overlap between the two you usually have receptors that pick up raw bits of information. That information undergoes different levels of processing as it heads downsteam. Where it gets more abstract is when it comes to your perception. The things you perceive and recognize begin to dissociate from individual neurons or even groups of neurons; meaning there's not a 1:1 reduction of perception to neurons.

In the visual system it used to be thought that there were "grandmother neurons" which had the exclusive role of recognizing your grandmother and nothing else; and so on for every object in the universe, one neuron for each object. This is a problem because there aren't enough neurons in the brain to recognize all the objects in existence.

So perhaps when it comes to smell such as pizza or foul odors, the sensations are activated by individual receptors, but the perception doesn't correspond to individual neurons. The information for pizza could be contained in the patterns of activation instead. But again, I'm just guessing.

[Pat Mustard]

Dolphins are often seen as cheerful because their snout and clicks look and sound as if they're smiling or laughing. Not to mention a lot of people didn't like the live action lion king movie as much as the cartoon, despite being pretty much identical scene by scene. Probably because the cartoons were given more human-like facial expressions, whereas animals don't realistically have them. So we connect with the characters less.

What a spectacular display of ignorance. You should be ashamed of yourself yet I am certain you will not be.

Some people are proud of their stupidity. Breezy* epitomises that type of person.

*An apt name given where his "ideas" emanate from.

---

I'm a graduate student studying cognitive science. My religion is scientific accuracy; don't sin against my religion with unsubstantiated claims about consciousness.

Yeah, and I'm the Queen of Sheba. The only way you're "studying" anything is if you're in a diploma mill or unaccreditable fundie college.

[John 6IX Breezy]

That's fascinating.  What about smells?  Do different neurons fire when we smell something pleasant like a slice of Pizza vs. when we smell something rotten or unpleasant like mold, or something else that would be bad for us?

Here's a good video lecture video on the issues with grandmother neurons plus the limits of reductionism:

https://youtu.be/5gbH-Fx5tl4

[The Grand Nudger]

You have a fundamental objection to reductionism. Other's don't. Bickering over the contents of cognitive science is pointless when you're levying a genetic objection to reductionism employed by science.

If you do it while also referring to those facts described by cognitive science....that would be a stolen concept. Ultimately, you need to make up your mind. Either there are, in fact, facts of cog sci (which in your case at least support the notion of this or that thing you're objecting to)...or there aren't(and so, being not-facts..they cannot).

"These true cog sci facts establish that cog sci is genetically false" is a non starter.

[John 6IX Breezy]

Are you meaning to say generic instead of genetic?

For starters, If I were using cognitive science to argue against science, perhaps that would be a stolen concept. But within the field of cognitive science there's nothing sacred that cannot be challenged. Perhaps it'll make more sense to you if you refer to the "tools of cognitive science" as opposed to the "facts of cognitive science," since cognitive science is just a label for the tools and methods used to study the brain and mind. Scientists are free to use the tools of cognitive science to refute the ideas and research of other scientists. This isn't a stolen concept.

That said, I don't know anyone in the field that claims to know animals have consciousness, or even a conscience, like you do. Keep it clear that I haven't argued against any "facts of cognitive science" only against you for making them up.

[The Grand Nudger]

No, I mean to say genetic. The matter of a stolen concept arises when one assertion or premise used to reject another shares a genetic relationship with that other. Consider a hierarchy of claims as a family tree. If two assertions of fact are cousins, then the fact of their shared grandparent cannot be what makes one true and the other false.

Specifically with reference to your comments, an assertion of fact derived from reduction necessarily accepts the genetic validity of reduction. MA has tried to explain this to you in single units, that unit being special pleading - as he put it, making exceptions for one case and not another meaningfully identical case.

As far as unproductive diversions over the contents of cog sci and what people in that field do and don't accept about non-human cognizance.....

Why not just google it? You might not know.....but there is a way to know. Also as MA put it, there's no sense in warning anyone you're talking to about the limits of fmri's and the like - the entire field if you wanted to..really. Those limits and warnings are informed by the same logical formulation. We "know" them just as much and for the same reasons as we "know" of consciousness, human or otherwise.

[John 6IX Breezy]

Ok so you're using genetic in some metaphorical sense, not literally derived from genes.

I have no idea what you're talking about in the rest of your comment. I haven't said anything about reduction. David Chalmers among others do view consciousness as irreducible, but I haven't said anything relevant about them.