rlr@pyuxn.UUCP (Rich Rosen) (07/05/84)
It's kind of funny that Alan should bring this up now. > Rich, there are two things that bother me about your articles: > (1) There is something fundamentally uncertain about the human > situation. You've tried to show people this, to get them to > see that ultimately, they can't defend their beliefs. Great. > Then you seem to expect people to give up their beliefs, since > they can't be defended. But no belief system can be defended! > And without any world view, people resemble marshmallows. > Do you see my point? Ok, so now I know I can't prove anything. > (And I'm a better person for it.) Why should I drop my beliefs? > What would I replace them with? Other beliefs? (Sorry, being > a marshmallow isn't my idea of fun.) > By the way, have you given up your beliefs yet? Don't you act > as if the sun will rise in the morning, even though YOU CAN'T > PROVE THAT IT EVER HAS, OR EVER WILL. (And before you try to > argue that one, remember YOU CAN'T PROVE I EXIST, so why are you > arguing with me?) It's very interesting that Alan makes these points, because he is, in fact, arguing with (or talking to) me as he writes. And I'm sure he goes to sleep expecting to see the sun the next morning (provided that it doesn't rain or that he hasn't had so rough a night that he sleeps until dusk :-). When you look closely at such points, one will note that even Jeff Sargent and David Norris and Paul Dubuc (and maybe even Larry Bickford) more than likely drive to work in the morning EXPECTING their cars to work, and ingest food at regular intervals EXPECTING that this will assist in the susteance of their lives and EXPECTING that their bodies will not suddenly explode for no logical reason. And when their cars don't work, or when they somehow feel sick after eating, they seek to find the rational logical reason why this has happened, rather than looking in the Bible for a passage prophesying their car and stomach problems. The point is, that all these people appear to accept the existence of the physical world, and to accept the results of rational inquiry and scientific knowledge in their daily lives. As far as proof goes, no, you can't undeniably prove or disprove anything in a closed system. Yet we see even those who would tell us of deities, of souls, of minds as real existing entities, these people still living their lives under rationalist assumptions about the nature of their sensory input. Using those same axioms that rationalists use in formulating logical thought, only to deny those same axioms when it comes to their beliefs. If our senses are wrong, then we have nothing to go on. (How could an abstraction of reality be "wrong"? What would it mean to ask "Does blue *really* look like that or is it just my senses?" ?) Yet we "go on" (or act on) our sensory input continuously. If what our senses perceive as "reality" is nothing more than a simulation (e.g., all of us are really sitting in chairs in hell attached to machines that feed us all of our sensory input through an interwoven computer complex that correlates everyone's input and output and adjusts accordingly), then so be it. How do you tell "if it's live or if it's Memorex" from inside the system? And, more importantly, does it matter? (By the way, a "simulation" of what? If our senses are being "fed" information that somehow doesn't correspond to *real* "reality", and if that information is consistent, which is really the real reality for us, especially if we have no input/output from/to any other reality? And what *is* the real "reality" that our senses are not sensing? And how do know that THAT'S not a simulation? And of what? ...) The biggest mistake I see in the logic of those who propose gods and telepathy and such is their notion that such things, if they existed, would be somehow external to physical reality. Wrong. Dead wrong. Well, dead wrong if you use an all-encompassing definition of physical reality: everything that physically is out there. If there is a god that has "channels" into what we consider to be "our" world (how anthropocentric!), those would be physical channels, and god would be a part of the overall physical reality. Now, these channels may manifest themselves through subatomic particles that are somehow coincident in a dimension from which we get no sensory input. The point is, if god exists, it would be as physical as everything else out there, even though it may be a part of the physical world that our senses cannot observe directly. Remember, once people could not "see" microscopic objects, but now through advancements in science, they can be observed indirectly. (Realize that all "observations" are made "indirectly"; try "showing" a book to a person with no senses--blind, deaf, no sense of touch or smell. If this "senseless" person should "die", would he/she know it? Feel it?) Then again, we may never be so advanced scientifically that we can actually see the things I describe, even indirectly. > You keep telling us how rational you are. You're not like the > rest of us -- your beliefs are based on reason. But you can't > prove anything by logic alone. You have to start with axioms > and inference rules, and how do you justify them? You can't > use logic! Historically, they have been justified by APPEALS > TO INTUITION. Considering your recent tirade about intuition, > you seem to be caught between a rock and a hard place. Well, > we all are. I'd just like to see you be more honest about it. On the contrary, I'm saying that I'm exactly like the rest of "us", at least in the general sense that I perceive the world around me rationally. (The point I made was that others do this, too, yet when describing other belief systems this similarity disappears. And the question is "Why?".) Alan seems to be referring to my articles on the nature of mind/brain fallacies and intuition. The only articles in that discussion that I would refer to as "tirades" are those that lashed out at Gordon Moffett for his simple straightforward request that those who proposed the existence of a "mind" should provide some evidence, not unlike requests that have been repeatedly made here. If you read my articles on intuition, you would remember that what I said implied that intuition was a subconscious process in which the "obvious" comes to the forefront (through either random or other high-speed background searches) and a sudden (or obvious) realization is made. What seems obvious to most people is the result of their sensory observations. And although they may not be "correct" in some ultimate reality, if they are not correct in "this" reality, then we ain't got no real reality at all, so we might as well all stop driving to work in the morning. I assume that Jeff and Alan, et al, will continue to go to work and pay the bills and eat the food... Until I see them rejecting the physical reality that they seem to deny in formulating belief, as the stereotypical Buddhist monk/guru/lama (not llama), I will continue to go along with that reality, real or imagined as it may be. Whether we were created by a god or we are the by-products of survival-oriented evolution, it wouldn't be likely that our senses would be lying to us, feeding us contrary information, about the reality that we experience, else we'd all be falling off of cliffs and exploding at random moments. A lot of the dead weight in this article is to squelch in advance the comments like "Well, how do you know that this is the *real* reality?". The point being that it doesn't matter, it can't ever be shown that there is some other reality for which this reality is only a "simulation", and for us this reality as perceived by us is as real as it gets. -- If it doesn't change your life, it's not worth doing. Rich Rosen pyuxn!rlr
janney@unm-cvax.UUCP (07/13/84)
Note: the first time I tried to post this, the phone line dropped while I was still in vi. I think I cancelled it successfully: apologies if you got a partial message. > If I believe that God is the ground of all being, > the "ether", as it were, of the universe, then I certainly would not > consider him to be subject to physical law. (By the way, all that special > relativity would say of such an ether is that it cannot be detected; you > cannot prove scientifically that something does not exist; only that using > the methods of science would not disclose its existence.) This is somewhat beside the point of the original article, but I would like to point out that it is not generally true that one cannot disprove the existence of something. If the nature of an object is inherently self-contradictory, that object cannot exist: for instance, it is easy to demonstrate that there is no integer so large that every integer bigger than it is composite. Or, if you are dealing with a finite domain, an exhaustive search will do quite nicely, at least in principle. In either case, the object in question must have established, well-defined properties. If something is capable of influencing the physical world, we can, at least in principle, detect it by observing its effects on the physical world and thus we can ascribe to it a physical existence, subject to some physical laws. These need not be the laws of physics as we currently understand them: those could easily be a special case of something more complex. The term "physical laws" is extremely misleading. Physical "laws" are not a set of rules enforced by cosmic policemen; they are useful working models for observable phenomena. Jim Janney {{convex,ucbvax,gatech}!unmvax, {purdue,lbl-csam,cmcl2}!lanl-a}!unm-cvax!janney "And sometimes at the very end of a sentence I'll suddenly come out with the wrong fuse-box."