rlr@pyuxd.UUCP (Professor Wagstaff) (03/14/85)
> Exactly. (What? Rosen agreeing with Torek?) Faulty > perceptive abilities would have resulted in > starvation/failure/death. > > This depends on how you define ``faulty''. Dogs have survived without > colour vision, and we have survived without the hearing range of a > dolphin and all of us see optical illusions sometimes. Is this > ``faulty''? [LAURA] No, none of them are any less faulty then the fact that we are unable to see X-rays, etc. The word that would be better applied is "limited" as all these perceptions are. "Faulty" would mean that a tiger is coming at you, and you see a game show host offering you valuable prizes. (That was a joke, too, Laura.) > Ah, I feel this way because I have been working on ways to perceive > more and pay attnetion to what I am perceiving for years. I am much > better now than I was then, but still, on days like today, I can > remember other days when I both perceived more and understood more. > Perceptions offer us a picture of reality, yes, but I don't know > whether it is ``fair'' or not. It is the only game in town! I would > have to know reality itself better to be able to make that sort of a > judgement, and this I cannot seem to do without using perceptions. Of course, it could all be an illusion, even if consistent accurate observations are made about reality. But I'd have to ask of people who believe this here... > 2) why they're typing a terminal if they don't believe it.) > > Because it is a useful way of getting done what I want to get done. I > still don't know whether it is ``fair'' or not -- it is just the only > game in town. What about solitaire? :-? > Interestingly, your posing this question seems to imply that I have > free will -- that I chose to type at a terminal. It does? The "choosing" process involved your chemical processes accessing stored knowledge/experience constructs, analyzing them using the brain and acting on the analysis. (See my recent articles in response to Torek in net.philo) > If you made the same choice, Rich, then do you believe that you have a soul? > Or was that question bogus from your point of view? It's bogus in that there's no reason to believe that the choice I would have made implies either free will or a soul. > It is only when our more complex brains engage in high-speed > analysis (another reason we survived so well) about very > complex things (like the nature of the universe), rather than > rigorous analysis and acknowledgment that our interpretation > may be based on wishful thinking, that we see a problem. > > What makes you think that rigorous analysis is going to produce any > better results than high-speed analysis? What if the problem is in the > analysis itself? Then the means by which you analyzed my paragraph and thought to ask that question has that problem, so I won't bother to answer such a question that stems from such a problem filled analysis... [BUT YOU JUST DID! -ED.] > Also, it is wrong to assume that religious thinkers were not rigorous > in their thinking -- in many cases they believed that they had evidence > that you would either deny, or explain differently, but > misunderstanding evidence is a flaw shared by many rigorous thinkers. I said that in my article "Logic based on..." article. (Remember that, Laura, the article with the points in it that you just skipped over to harp on a select few?) And the problem with that rigorous thinking is in the fact that they made so many unwarranted assumptions. -- "It's a lot like life..." Rich Rosen ihnp4!pyuxd!rlr
laura@utzoo.UUCP (Laura Creighton) (03/15/85)
Human thought is limited. Human ability to perceive is limited. You can work on perceiving and thinking better, though, but it pays to notice *what* am I thinking. *how* am I thinking. Really and truly feeling yourself think is hard work. (And where is the I that is doing the thinking?) The normal tendancy is to build a model and say ``thinking is like this'' which isn't the same thing. Rich, I have nothing to say about the second half of your Logic and Beleifs articles. They all predicate on some beliefs that you assume, for instance that all religions are founded on a belief in some external deity and that people believe in their religions because they want to arrive at the conclusions that the will arrive at by assuming the belief. On one level, I think that everybody believes in anythngthat they believe in for this reason. However, on a more immdiate level, I have no problem finding religious believers who are doing exactly this -- but I have found others who *aren't*. They think that they have real evidence for believing in what they believe in, and also think that they could perscribe a course of action for you which would result in your having the same evidence. This is why I wanted to replace ``god'' with ``religious experience'' in your article. Religious experiences happen, and people come out of them believing that they have real evidence for the existence of God, or an ultimate reality, or *something*. I do not think that your article adressed them at all, and I am much more interested in them than in the people who infer the existence of God from the existence of pain, or the bible, or the world. If God matters, then It had better be able to communicate its existence to us. But, further more, if it *does* communicate its existence to us, then it matters! Laura Creighton utzoo!laura