Doug, I think there’s a world of difference, and that the implications are enormous. We know we’re in love through direct experience. You could even call it revealed Truth, and sometimes I do, especially if I’m trying to make a point about what revealed Truth really is. The difference between this and, say, the specific gravity of WD30 oil, is not naturalism versus supernaturalism, but subjective experience versus objective reality. The latter can be reduced quite easily to physical terms, but the former cannot, at least not yet and probably never in the same ways. No matter science tells us (I hope), our feelings are our feelings.
We know we’re hungry through direct experience too. You only use “love” because of the implicit romantic connotations, but it’s all of a piece.
We gain our knowledge of objective reality through our eyes, which give us (using your terms) “subjective experience”. No doubt the sort of internal sensors that make us fall in love are quite a bit more complex and mysterious at this point, but not completely so. Again, other animals pair-bond regularly, and so must have similar neurochemical sensors and reactions in their brains that follow other similar external cues that we do.
I am not denying that “our feelings are our feelings” or that our feelings are important or crucial or that I love my wife. All I’m saying is that they have no bearing on the question of supernaturalism.
PLaClair - 03 January 2008 05:28 PM
If neuroscientists came up with a list of criteria to determine whether you were in love,
--- and hooked you up and measured your brain waves responding to stimuli regarding the ?loved one
--- then told you either
--- that you were in love, but you thought you weren’t, or
--- that you weren’t in love, but you thought you were:
Would you believe the scientists or your feelings? Justify your answer.
That’s sort of like asking, “What if a scientist hooked you up and measured your brain and found you were dead, what would you do then?” Or, “What if a scientist took an MRI of your skull and found out you had no brain?” It’s a silly exercise. Clearly if that sort of thing really happened, either there would be something wrong with the machine, or something fundamentally wrong with the scientific theory. But it’s not going to happen. Or at the very least, wake me up when it does. Then things might get interesting!
PLaClair - 03 January 2008 05:28 PM
It’s an important question because there are religious experiences. They don’t necessarily mean what the people having them think they mean. At the same time, they are very real to those who experience them. I don’t think we give enough attention to human experience, which is after all an essential part of any sensible values system, no?
Nobody denies that religious experiences are very important to those who experience them. That is almost tautologous. The question is why they are having them and what they mean. VS Ramachandran has some interesting data on temporal lobe epilepsy that shows that at least some such experiences appear to be wholly neural in origin, and are in fact signs of brain illness. This does not mean that all claims of religious experience are brain illnesses (some are pious frauds as well, others involve creative memory or may be different sorts of hallucinations, etc.)
Put another way, there are people with claimed experiences of alien abductions, ghosts, bigfoot, devils, witches, the evil eye, spiritual possession, astral travel, past-life regression, and on and on. Some may take these to mean that there are huge realms of supernatural reality out there for us to discover. But using Occam’s razor it is much simpler simply to see them as monuments to the creativity of the human brain, since there is simply no external evidence for any of it.
Doug, I agree with your first point. I wasn’t discussing supernaturalism. For me, that isn’t even a question.
I don’t agree that the difference between experience and the material foundation of experience is just a silly excuse. It’s our experience, the final test as it were. It’s silly, of course, if we try to apply it to a corpse, but it’s not silly if we apply it to living human beings. Science may one day be able to tell us quite reliably whether we are in love (or hungry, etc.), by measuring our brain waves, chemical responses, etc. With a science that sophisticated, and if my datin’ days weren’t far behind me, I would probably even give a long, hard look toward someone science said I loved, because let’s face it, we fool ourselves all the time. But let’s just suppose that, based on my faith in science, I lived with that person for a year and just felt every day as though my skin was crawling. In the end, my experience will trump the science. No? You may argue that science that good won’t ever be wrong. Maybe, but all that tells me is that the science has become enormously sophisticated. We’re still going to test it against experience.
I agree with your points on religious experience, except that I think we secularists tend to gloss them over too readily. As a born-again Humanist, I’m not prepared to do that. Some religious experiences, including my own, truly improve our view of the world, including that they bring reality into clearer focus.
As a scientist without a strong background in philosophy, I think this “epistemic pluralism” sounds like a way to sneak in special, privileged modes of knowing for each area of knowledge.
True, the dishonest man can use epistemic pluralism to be sneaky. But abusus no tollit usus. And in the case of spousal love, no-one has shown that it is ‘scientific’ in any technical sense other than we have ‘evidence’ and ‘form a justified belief’. Those steps are much too general to be uncontroversially called ‘scientific’ or ‘naturalistic’.
Doug, I agree with your first point. I wasn’t discussing supernaturalism. For me, that isn’t even a question.
OK, then I imagine we are just talking past one another.
PLaClair - 04 January 2008 08:01 AM
I don’t agree that the difference between experience and the material foundation of experience is just a silly excuse. It’s our experience, the final test as it were. It’s silly, of course, if we try to apply it to a corpse, but it’s not silly if we apply it to living human beings. Science may one day be able to tell us quite reliably whether we are in love (or hungry, etc.), by measuring our brain waves, chemical responses, etc. With a science that sophisticated, and if my datin’ days weren’t far behind me, I would probably even give a long, hard look toward someone science said I loved, because let’s face it, we fool ourselves all the time. But let’s just suppose that, based on my faith in science, I lived with that person for a year and just felt every day as though my skin was crawling. In the end, my experience will trump the science. No? You may argue that science that good won’t ever be wrong. Maybe, but all that tells me is that the science has become enormously sophisticated. We’re still going to test it against experience.
Of course. But my point is you’re assuming the science is no good when you’re coming up with thought-experiments in which the machine tells you you’re in love with Julie and yet you feel nothing at all for her. Let’s take a simpler case. One might say that the liver had nothing to do with cleaning the blood. Take a similar thought experiment: the doctor hooks up a machine to you and tells you your liver has stopped functioning, and yet you feel perfectly healthy! Well, your experience trumps the science, no?
The problem is that this isn’t going to happen, unless there’s something either wrong with the machine, or unless the science is fundamentally in error. (It does happen, although very rarely).
Your brain and its functions are quite a bit more complex than your liver, but at base it’s the same case. If the machine tells you you’re in love with Julie and the science is good, you will already know you are in love with Julie. It’s not going to surprise you.
PLaClair - 04 January 2008 08:01 AM
I agree with your points on religious experience, except that I think we secularists tend to gloss them over too readily. As a born-again Humanist, I’m not prepared to do that. Some religious experiences, including my own, truly improve our view of the world, including that they bring reality into clearer focus.
Let me simply use the words “spiritual experience” rather than “religious experience”. Watching Sagan’s Cosmos series I can say I have very deep and profound spiritual appreciation for nature. This includes feelings or experiences. If we are in agreement that such experiences demonstrate nothing about communication with some supernatural world or reality, then I think we’re saying the same thing in different ways.
I still disagree with your assertion than “nature” and “naturalism” have simple, obvious, slam-dunk definitions that you can assert and we all need to accept. Of course, you only commented on the former term, but given the topic of the thread I am assuming you meant to define it in order to comment on the debate (meaningless, in your mind) about the second.
I did not claim ownership of the word “naturalism” nor any sort of authority over the properness of its definition. Words can mean whatever we intend or agree on them to mean. I only asserted that words like “nature” and “naturalism” have a certain all encompassing meaning when used by naturalists. And that when one starts discussing things using words like “supernatural” or “beyond what is natural” they are not having the same conversation. If they disagree about the content about the natural world, they ought be arguing about what is “natural.” If they disagree about the method of understanding the world (aka the ‘natural’ world) then they ought to argue about methodology.
Or else, I am happy to temporarily drop my manner of using such words as “natural” and “naturalism” in their conventional manner in order to facilitate their local discussion, as I have done in temporarily accepting Jayhawker Soule’s definition. As such, nature no longer means “everything” but rather, nature (meaning only certain processes & things) + supernature (some other sorts of other processes & things) = “everything.” If you don’t like the word “supernature” then feel free to choose or invent the word of your choice and I’ll go with you on it.
Of course, the next issue is in examining what goes within that “supernature” category. If there is nothing that is reasonable to it, then we revert back to my original equation of nature = everything. If there is something that is reasonable to our “supernature” category then we have a genuine increase in our knowledge of “everything” that includes one or more categories of “stuff.” Now nature + supernature (or many supernatures) = everything.
Regardless, it is a misnomer to think that “naturalists” are not amenable to such discoveries. They most certainly are. They simply don’t see any valid reason for distinguishing such “supernature” things as anything uniquely separate from “natural” things. The naturalist does not claim that there are not things that are unknown. The naturalist does not even claim that there not many different ways of knowing, many of which we might not yet have figured out. The naturalist just puts it all under the same umbrella, and for good reason.
It is fascinating how criticisms of how fallible our knowledge of the natural word are never followed up with clear reasonable examples of anything outside of it. Of course our methods are fallible. So, what else is there?
Well, I do certainly agree that nature=everything because I am a naturalist, and that is the position I am defending. However, I can understand why others might disagree with that assertion, as clearly they do. Conventionally, I think nature is used by most people to describe the physical world as science understand it and supernatural is used to describe things they believe exist but that science cannot say anything about (God, the soul, etc). Again, I agree that the second is a probably a bogus category since it is merely designed to reserve space for things that don’t exist, but we can’t simply assert that for most people since the vast majoity don’t see it that way. We have to make the case for nature=everything, and it is more than a semantic case. Many believers in the supernatural feel the existence of such things is obvious and readily apparent because of errors in their epistemology or reaoning, so I am hoping that some of these eliefs can be countered by deonstrating these errors. Of course, many of the beliefs are motivated more deeply by wanting to believe for psychological reasons, so other strategies are necessary to deal with those issues.
A very long post, partly FYI, partly to dialogue with Doug.
First, to a couple of posters: We need not fear pseudo-sciences will clog our corpus of knowledge if we accept non-naturalism. First, non-naturalism can always stick to the method of reductio. That’s all one needs to be a ‘non-naturalist’ - it’s the ‘No Confidence’ vote, and you can vote ‘no confidence’ in something without having a clue what the replacement should look like - it just won’t be natural alone. The ESP’er is on his own after that. I just gave him the same chips anyone gets for the casino. I haven’t given him a clue how to win the game. Bon chance.
Okay, how to make clear the Doug-Kirk gap - so to speak?
First, some definitions just FYI. Why worry about methods of knowledge separate from an explanation of its nature in the world?
(A.) The naturalist -non-naturalist debate has some very broad choices of attack. Non-N might be anti-natural or ‘idealist’, like Pythagoreanism or some eastern religious thought; (2) it might be non-monistic like Aristotle’s form-matter world or Decartes’ two really separate substances, or even the ‘heavens and earth’ of popular mythology.
(B.) On the other hand, it might stop worrying directly about ontologies. It might concentrate on our methods of knowledge - disciplines in science are usually diversified by their objects. If there’s really a distinct set of non-natural objects, then that might well show up in our epistemology. The ‘epistemic non-naturalist’ might be able to reductio any method of knowing that’s recognizably naturalistically causal. *Then* let the metaphysical chips lay where they fall.
Naturalist Moves (selection).
The naturalist isn’t without weapons. (1) He can fall back on proving non-natural properties are impossible, even if granted true. (But that’s no longer epistemic naturalism. The epistemically-minded philosopher thinks we have to get our knowing right first, not return to the same stale arguments about ontology.) This kind of epistemic naturalist claims he can somehow dilute the realism implied by any method of knowledge - sure, there’s non-natural methods of knowledge but the natural world is still all there is. (2)The naturalist might be reductionistically-minded. Screw ‘different’; the difference just shall one day be measured, and that’s a closeable ‘gap’, not one of those scary ‘qualitative’ gaps that cry out for a new independent set of objects to be the knolwedge of. Horse-manure is a sign of horses, not of any other creature, nor a mere symptom of something not distinctly horse-like. (That seems the import of what Socrates means by introducing the observation that ‘horsiness’ implies horses in the Apology, when he’s discussing ‘divine’ things like how to justify and pursue truth.) (3) The naturalist might be epistemically ‘po-mo’. Damn all the modes of knowledge for lacking a reason for a belief. Just worship force under cover of justification, or pretend while really believing it’s all a word-game. No-one’s dancing the philosophical Continental in this forum yet, however, so let’s avoid that issue! I know less how to reply to a post-modernist about knowledge than any disagreement I might have with Doug. To me ‘it’s like arguing with a plant’ as Aristotle says!
Non-naturalist moves (selection).
(1) Now, to return to the epistemic non-naturalist. He needn’t give a distinct explication of the structure. Why on earth not?? He needn’t for the same kind of reason that the metaphysical kind of non-naturalist needn’t give a positive theory: of non-natural realism about morals, justification, virtue, whatever the subjects under review. All he needs is the ability to say ‘it’s not even a question about insufficient information, you just cannot get there from here.
Admittedly, the epistemic non-naturalist eliminates one difficulty by allowing for another. (Those are the breaks. I just dcannot conceive of ever having the perfect theory, and it often smells like the New Atheists pretend they have just that. That is a confidence-man’s trick.)
(2) So, altho’ the non-naturalist only has to ‘prove naturalism false’ in order to automatically justify non-naturalism - a slick but legal trick! - he does have to prove that there is a real category-gap beween the two methods of knowing. He has to prove - somehow - that the method can count as knowledge commonly defined, even though the gap is a qualitative difference and cannot possibly be just a quantifable gap between ultimately identical kinds of methods.
(3) The naturalist might well just push the answer into an indefinite future - Doug’s mentioned it earlier.
The Doug-Kirk gap!
That move - (3) - is one of those moves where Doug and I have a fundamental disagreement, that can be hard for even experts to describe exactly.
I think that I have a wideR scope for observation than Doug would ever allow for. I also think that I let “indemonstrables” have a bigger independent role in knowledge than Doug would ever allow. Observation - or better to use an older word, judgment or ‘perception’ - is evidence independent of any theory, and judgment can be justified ultimately by successful and reliable inter-person judgment. So i’d criticize that ‘indefinite future’ argument as being part of a too-sunny picture of current theories.
Btw:
Someone worried ‘what about ghosts?’ Well! First off, ghosts aren’t like quarks, but rather like furniture - judgments that they exist seem a matter for anyone and everyone, not just a class of experts, real or putative. *If* enough people judged there to be ghosts, and independent witnesses reliably judged ‘that’s what we mean when we say ‘there’s a ghost’, and there’s one of them right now’, well, then it’s likely there’s ghosts, and we should add ‘Ghosts exist’ to our corpus of object-knowledge.
Now, what if our corpus of theories somehow requires that we add instead the sentence ‘No ghosts exist’?
(1) Well, if I needed this game to be Doug vs Kirk, then I’d accuse Doug of being far too happy about confidence in our corpus of theories, and Doug might well accuse me of being far too hippy-dippy about trusting in how things appear.
(2) I’m not worried about ghosts specifically, because there are so few judgments of the sort I count as ‘reliable.’ Ghost-hunting in fact just doesn’t dig up many ghost-facts. Ethics and Critical thinking dont’ even bother to do that - which seems wise, for ‘you ought to do X’ has long been thought of as a thing that cannot be proven by amassing more facts of nature. No serious non-naturalist is a lie-chase, or a justification-chaser.
(3) Further, ghost-hunting, even if sincere, doesn’t look like either natural or non-naturalist disciplines. They give us no new light on justification, on morals, or even spousal love (except that it might extend beyond the grave in creepy as well as glad ways!). And of course I reject ghost-hunting as worth any great sum of money or research - so little that academies don’t typically fund it. I don’t mind putative disciplines mucking around in the ‘bush league’ of knowledge for a while, and i dont’ think pseudo-science is much to worry about - to be frank. ‘Good wine needs no bush.’
Kirk, I’m getting a bit lost in that argument of yours—it’s too cryptic.
Let’s begin with the different forms of non-naturalism. You have about six putative forms of non-naturalism there, and it’s not clear what any of them amount to. It’s not clear that they are non-naturalist, how they are, or what they claim. To take a few examples: I do understand what idealism is, but I am not convinced that Pythagoreanism is idealist. Nor am I convinced that Aristotelianism is non-naturalist. So instead of getting ourselves lost down a number of blind alleys, why don’t we begin with the form of non-naturalism you are actually prone to defend. Why is it non-naturalist? What evidence is there to believe it is true?
That will get us down to brass tacks.
As for this:
inthegobi - 04 January 2008 11:12 AM
Someone worried ‘what about ghosts?’ Well! First off, ghosts aren’t like quarks, but rather like furniture - judgments that they exist seem a matter for anyone and everyone, not just a class of experts, real or putative. *If* enough people judged there to be ghosts, and independent witnesses reliably judged ‘that’s what we mean when we say ‘there’s a ghost’, and there’s one of them right now’, well, then it’s likely there’s ghosts, and we should add ‘Ghosts exist’ to our corpus of object-knowledge.
Ugh. This isn’t at all a scientific way of approaching the problem. Go back a few centuries and everyone seemed to be seeing witches. That is—emphatically—not a reason to believe that there actually were witches. And indeed the burnings that resulted from this craze show the real moral danger that poor epistemology brings to the table.
Sometimes people see things that aren’t there. What is needed is careful, independent investigation, especially of phenomena which we already have reason to believe are uncertain. To see how this can be well done, I suggest perusing the many articles in Skeptical Inquirer by Joe Nickell and others on real-life ghost hunting.
As for the “that’s what we mean when we say there’s a ghost” line ... No no. It’s a quick slide to end up saying, “What we mean by a witch is a societally marginal old woman with probable mental illness”. So hey presto, there really are witches!
... except that that’s NOT what we mean by “there’s a witch”. What we mean by a witch is a woman with evilly inspired magical powers. And there aren’t any of those. Same thing about ghosts. By “ghost” we don’t mean “Some odd bumpings and thumpings in the attic at night”. We mean the spirit of a dead person that is able to interact fitfully with the physical world. And there is no reason to believe that such things exist.
Let me clarify something I said above. Yes, first-person testimony of X is a reason to believe X, but not necessarily a good reason. It depends entirely on the case. In the case of witches, for example, it’s clearly not a good reason at all.
Pretheoretically we are inclined to take all testimony as equally valid and valuable. And certainly all of it is to some degree in any case: assuming the people are honest, we can at least gauge what they believe they experienced. But when we learn more about these cases, the information we gather forces us to take certain sorts of testimony with large grains of salt. And given the immense fallibility of human memory, it should lead us to take all forms of testimony—particularly testimony that involves long-term memory, which kicks in after a very short time indeed—with grains of salt anyhow.
A very long post, partly FYI, partly to dialogue with Doug.
inthegobi - 04 January 2008 11:12 AM
(3) - is one of those moves where Doug and I have a fundamental disagreement, that can be hard for even experts to describe exactly.
These are a very arrogant things to say. Who are you FYIing? Why is your view any more so an authority view than anyone else’s on this forum? You do not speak some sort of special philosopher code that is so fancy that only a properly schooled philosopher like Doug can possibly have pondered your insights. Do you really think that you and Doug are the “experts” (You’ll have to excuse me Doug. I almost think that you are an expert. ) and that the rest of us are just jaw dropped spectators?
inthegobi - 04 January 2008 11:12 AM
(A.) The naturalist -non-naturalist debate has some very broad choices of attack. Non-N might be anti-natural or ‘idealist’, like Pythagoreanism or some eastern religious thought; (2) it might be non-monistic like Aristotle’s form-matter world or Decartes’ two really separate substances, or even the ‘heavens and earth’ of popular mythology.
(B.) On the other hand, it might stop worrying directly about ontologies. It might concentrate on our methods of knowledge - disciplines in science are usually diversified by their objects. If there’s really a distinct set of non-natural objects, then that might well show up in our epistemology. The ‘epistemic non-naturalist’ might be able to reductio any method of knowing that’s recognizably naturalistically causal. *Then* let the metaphysical chips lay where they fall.
Naturalist Moves (selection).
The naturalist isn’t without weapons. (1) He can fall back on proving non-natural properties are impossible, even if granted true. (But that’s no longer epistemic naturalism. The epistemically-minded philosopher thinks we have to get our knowing right first, not return to the same stale arguments about ontology.) This kind of epistemic naturalist claims he can somehow dilute the realism implied by any method of knowledge - sure, there’s non-natural methods of knowledge but the natural world is still all there is. (2)The naturalist might be reductionistically-minded. Screw ‘different’; the difference just shall one day be measured, and that’s a closeable ‘gap’, not one of those scary ‘qualitative’ gaps that cry out for a new independent set of objects to be the knolwedge of. Horse-manure is a sign of horses, not of any other creature, nor a mere symptom of something not distinctly horse-like. (That seems the import of what Socrates means by introducing the observation that ‘horsiness’ implies horses in the Apology, when he’s discussing ‘divine’ things like how to justify and pursue truth.) (3) The naturalist might be epistemically ‘po-mo’. Damn all the modes of knowledge for lacking a reason for a belief. Just worship force under cover of justification, or pretend while really believing it’s all a word-game. No-one’s dancing the philosophical Continental in this forum yet, however, so let’s avoid that issue! I know less how to reply to a post-modernist about knowledge than any disagreement I might have with Doug. To me ‘it’s like arguing with a plant’ as Aristotle says!
Your paraphrasing of the naturalist position is a gesture of putting words in the mouths of others. These are your considerations of the arguments against your view. They are not necessarily the considerations of the persons who actually hold opposing views. Your continued use of this device would be referred to, in a court room, as “steering a witness.” This is a forum for discussion. We are not your philosophy students.
inthegobi - 04 January 2008 11:12 AM
Non-naturalist moves (selection).
(1) Now, to return to the epistemic non-naturalist. He needn’t give a distinct explication of the structure. Why on earth not?? He needn’t for the same kind of reason that the metaphysical kind of non-naturalist needn’t give a positive theory: of non-natural realism about morals, justification, virtue, whatever the subjects under review. All he needs is the ability to say ‘it’s not even a question about insufficient information, you just cannot get there from here.
Admittedly, the epistemic non-naturalist eliminates one difficulty by allowing for another. (Those are the breaks. I just dcannot conceive of ever having the perfect theory, and it often smells like the New Atheists pretend they have just that. That is a confidence-man’s trick.)
(2) So, altho’ the non-naturalist only has to ‘prove naturalism false’ in order to automatically justify non-naturalism - a slick but legal trick! - he does have to prove that there is a real category-gap beween the two methods of knowing. He has to prove - somehow - that the method can count as knowledge commonly defined, even though the gap is a qualitative difference and cannot possibly be just a quantifable gap between ultimately identical kinds of methods.
(3) The naturalist might well just push the answer into an indefinite future - Doug’s mentioned it earlier.
(1) You do have to give some sort of explication of something. Or at least say something, anything, about what it is that you are asserting as separate but alongside nature. Otherwise you are quite simply not saying anything.
(2) Disproving a method or proposing an alternative one has no bearing on the grounding of whether or not there is a natural world. Disproof of this or that phenomenon within nature only results in a redefining of nature. This happens every day in science. Proving a “category gap” would be no different. It would simply illustrate two or more aspects of nature. Supernatural claims have every right in the world to a fair chance at being demonstrable facts of nature.
Erasmus, it was just for anyone’s info if they needed it or cared for it.
I do this for a living; it’s good to know where to improve what i’m saying. It just so happens I won’t be using any of this in classes this semester except for some of the epistemology. I don’t mind shopping incomplete or even turgid thoughts around - i’m very communal about that, although i don’t identify ‘what the community thinks’ with the truth - just with *some* level of ‘acceptance’.
I don’t have a sense of shame; I don’t mind sounding stupid, at least temporarily. Will that self-characterization of my skills please you better?
I think Doug wrapped up this whole thread early on when he said:
dougsmith - 01 January 2008 06:04 PM
The most exemplary ways to achieve knowledge are those enshrined in the natural sciences. Basically they involve a suite of techniques designed to eliminate bias, to isolate relevant variables, to clarify the question being asked, to assure oneself of statistical relevance, et cetera. All non-scientific ways of knowing are, a fortiori, less good than those in the natural sciences. However they are also more rough-and-ready, quicker to deploy, and due to our lengthy evolutionary history, often right.
I couldn’t have said it more efficiently.
Even non physical activities can assume scientific methodologies to explain their successes & failures by analyzing our history and testing theories against the future. Economics is a good example of this. I understand Kirk’s claim that allowing non-natural means of knowledge is like maintaining a diversified portfolio, when it comes to epistemology; however, it is possible to over diversify. As wikipedia says:
[quote author="wikipedia"]It is possible to over-diversify. If an investor holds several funds, then the risks and structure of his overall position is an amalgam of the holdings in all the different funds and arguably the investor’s holdings successively approximate to an index or market risk.
I think many of the people on this forum would claim that diversifying beyond an agnostic point of view becomes too risky and inefficient. That doesn’t mean we won’t be open-minded toward evidence. As Doug pointed out and I analogize, it might be easy for people to invest based on their gut feelings, but those who analyze the markets and acquire education & experience in the field are more likely to succeed.
I respect your dignity as quite qualified for your chosen career and I do not bring your skills into question, in the least. I certainly never said, or implied that you sound stupid in any way. I only advocate that persons on this forum ought to feel comfortable speaking as stridently toward you as you do toward them. Many forum members have approached you with good arguments, between the course of this and other threads, and it has struck me that many have been cast off rather off-handishly. At the very least, it appears to me that they have felt this way.
My earlier point about Philosophia Academeia was not meant as a slight toward philosophical institutions or academics. There is little doubt in my mind that philosophical matters can be most directly addressed in a concentrated (or academic) setting. Yet, I take issue with the assumption that doing philosophy for “a living” inecesssarily constitutes any greater of a grasp of its substance than does doing it “as a hobby.” Just as a good physicist ought be able to justify their positions regarding physics to a lay person, so ought a philosopher be capable of justifying their claims in a manner cogent to the commoner. And I think that members of this forum have a far deeper grasp of many philosophical issues than they suggest when they humble state “well I’m not a philosopher but...”.
I respect your dignity as quite qualified for your chosen career and I do not bring your skills into question, in the least. I certainly never said, or implied that you sound stupid in any way. I only advocate that persons on this forum ought to feel comfortable speaking as stridently toward you as you do toward them. Many forum members have approached you with good arguments, between the course of this and other threads, and it has struck me that many have been cast off rather off-handishly. At the very least, it appears to me that they have felt this way.
Yea, I stopped partipating in the “Are there moral facts? A debate about moral/ethical realism” thread, because none of my questions or comments were addressed.
I don’t agree that the difference between experience and the material foundation of experience is just a silly excuse. It’s our experience, the final test as it were. It’s silly, of course, if we try to apply it to a corpse, but it’s not silly if we apply it to living human beings. Science may one day be able to tell us quite reliably whether we are in love (or hungry, etc.), by measuring our brain waves, chemical responses, etc. With a science that sophisticated, and if my datin’ days weren’t far behind me, I would probably even give a long, hard look toward someone science said I loved, because let’s face it, we fool ourselves all the time. But let’s just suppose that, based on my faith in science, I lived with that person for a year and just felt every day as though my skin was crawling. In the end, my experience will trump the science. No? You may argue that science that good won’t ever be wrong. Maybe, but all that tells me is that the science has become enormously sophisticated. We’re still going to test it against experience.
Of course. But my point is you’re assuming the science is no good (1) when you’re coming up with thought-experiments in which the machine tells you you’re in love with Julie and yet you feel nothing at all for her. Let’s take a simpler case. One might say that the liver had nothing to do with cleaning the blood. Take a similar thought experiment: the doctor hooks up a machine to you and tells you your liver has stopped functioning, and yet you feel perfectly healthy! Well, your experience trumps the science, no? (2)
The problem is that this isn’t going to happen, unless there’s something either wrong with the machine, or unless the science is fundamentally in error. (It does happen, although very rarely).
Your brain and its functions are quite a bit more complex than your liver, but at base it’s the same case. If the machine tells you you’re in love with Julie and the science is good, you will already know you are in love with Julie. It’s not going to surprise you. (3)
PLaClair - 04 January 2008 08:01 AM
I agree with your points on religious experience, except that I think we secularists tend to gloss them over too readily. As a born-again Humanist, I’m not prepared to do that. Some religious experiences, including my own, truly improve our view of the world, including that they bring reality into clearer focus.
Let me simply use the words “spiritual experience” rather than “religious experience”. Watching Sagan’s Cosmos series I can say I have very deep and profound spiritual appreciation for nature. This includes feelings or experiences. If we are in agreement that such experiences demonstrate nothing about communication with some supernatural world or reality (4), then I think we’re saying the same thing in different ways.
(1) No, I’m saying the science may not be perfect at accomplishing what we try to use it to do. I don’t know of any perfect science, do you?
(2) No it doesn’t. My liver still isn’t functioning properly. Many are people are deathly ill without knowing it. The healthy functioning of an organ is not the same as the feeling of health or illness. If the test tells me that my liver has completely stopped functioning, then I’m dead, in which case I can’t tell anyone how I feel. If I’m telling the tale, something is wrong with the test, or there’s a gap in our knowledge.
(3) You’re assuming the science is perfect. On what basis, especially considering the fact that we’re in the realm of science fiction.
