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Justifying Your WorldView to an Impartial Onlooker.

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    #362
    Bannasidhe
    Moderators, Society & Culture Moderators Posts: 19,219 Mod ✭✭✭✭Bannasidhe


    joe40 wrote: »
    A religious dogma by definition cannot be wrong,

    Except when they decide the dogma was wrong and change it.


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    #363
    joe40
    Registered Users Posts: 3,811 ✭✭✭joe40


    Bannasidhe wrote: »
    Except when they decide the dogma was wrong and change it.

    Fair point, that happens too


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    #364
    antiskeptic
    Registered Users Posts: 9,555 ✭✭✭antiskeptic


    Mark Hamill wrote: »
    He has no evidence or argument or anything until you present him with some. Present some non-empirical evidence. I am asking you to justify your worldview to him, equipping him with a worldview capable of understanding the Christian argument and therefore making him partial to the christian worldview, is your aim.

    I confused. A worldview is a conclusion drawn from the evidence available. You don't equip someone with a worldview so that they might, on hearing the evidence for the worldview, form a worldview that they already have (because you've equipped them with it to start with).

    Your mixing things up.

    The issue is the impartial onlooker having to have attributes (or equipping if you like) capable of assessing the evidence presented. Experience of the empirical world is what you need him to have, for example. This, so that he can understand what you're talking about.

    You need him equipped empirically. But in order for him to be impartial, you need that he hasn't formed an empiricist worldview. That's your starting point. And that can be achieved hypothetically (and probably in actuality).

    It just can't be done for my half of the equation.


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    #365
    antiskeptic
    Registered Users Posts: 9,555 ✭✭✭antiskeptic


    Mark Hamill wrote: »
    Yeah, those two sentences amount to the same thing. You accept claims about reality based on what personally satisfies you above all else. Why do you think your personal satisfaction is unassailable?

    I don't do SNIP's, not least because you've snipped out the bit which shows they don't amount to the same thing.

    So, by satisfaction you just mean acceptance.

    I might accept a unfair pay cut. I wouldn't find it satisfactory. I might accept a fair pay cut. I would find that satisfactory.

    So no, I don't mean acceptance.






    Again, as reality as a whole clearly doesn't align with what makes anyone (perfectly and permanently) happy, someone's subjective satisfaction is not a measure of reality. Reality clearly doesn't care about what satisfies anyone.

    You've hopped from satisfaction to happy for some strange reason. As pointed out, satisfaction is neutral, it doesn't matter whether the satisfaction makes one happy or sad. Satisfaction is concerned with how well the overall mechanism (constructed from all the information available) works. The best mechanism is the most satisfactory.

    Now that's subjective of course: people still buy German cars and German cars aren't reliable.

    But since we're all in the subjective boat, that's hardly a dealbreaker.

    Find another way.

    Presumably the motivation would stem from lack of satisfaction with the current model.


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    #366
    antiskeptic
    Registered Users Posts: 9,555 ✭✭✭antiskeptic


    Mark Hamill wrote: »
    Which just brings us back to the same points you've failed to address before:

    1) You are saying that you can't believe in god without already believing in god

    You said that, not me. I wouldn't dream of saying that you can't be Irish without already being Irish. It's like saying you can't be a fish without already being a fish.






    2) You are not still not explaining why you believe you are right to believe in your god when there are people who are equally confident in believing in contradictory gods.

    As stated, I am not explaining/justifying my worldview to partial onlookers in this thread. So if the "why" relates to that (a detailed justification) then the reason has been given. Blind people couldn't see what I'm talking about and I'm not interested in banging my head against a wall

    As stated: As to why I can hold myself right whilst there are others with contradictory views to mine, including you. What of it? What do I care what other people think, in any conclusive sense? If I think their wrong (for the various reasons I won't be explaining to you, see above) then so be it. The issue, for you and me is personal satisfaction.



    To every onlooker, you and the other equally confident (but contradictory) believers look fundamentally the same. And before you can label away these onlookers as "1"s or "0"s, to say it doesn't matter because they are "blind" you need to answer the question of why your belief is right (to justify "blindness" being a thing), otherwise you are starting with the conclusion that your are right in order to conclude that you are right.

    I conclude I'm right based on self satisfaction. As do you. I don't need to answer the question to anyone but myself. The question gets answered by the satisfaction level reaching a threshold which exceeds any other explanation.

    Which doesn't mean I can't modify my view. There is plenty I wonder about and am not as satisfied about as I envisage I could be - if only I could figure out / obtain the information/ get the insight necessary to progress. But empiricism and all the other man-made attempts to enclose reality it won't ever be. The cat is out of the bag for me.


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    #367
    Mark Hamill
    Registered Users Posts: 7,771 ✭✭✭Mark Hamill


    antiskeptic wrote: »
    I confused. A worldview is a conclusion drawn from the evidence available. You don't equip someone with a worldview so that they might, on hearing the evidence for the worldview, form a worldview that they already have (because you've equipped them with it to start with).

    Your mixing things up.

    The issue is the impartial onlooker having to have attributes (or equipping if you like) capable of assessing the evidence presented. Experience of the empirical world is what you need him to have, for example. This, so that he can understand what you're talking about.

    You need him equipped empirically. But in order for him to be impartial, you need that he hasn't formed an empiricist worldview. That's your starting point. And that can be achieved hypothetically (and probably in actuality).

    You equip someone with a worldview by justifying that worldview, therefore making them partial to that worldview. I might not have put the "therefore" in my previous sentence in the correct place, so apologies if it wasn't clear.
    antiskeptic wrote: »
    It just can't be done for my half of the equation.

    Hence the second question, about why you believe in it then. That is being discussed in other posts, so I will continue there.


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    #368
    Mark Hamill
    Registered Users Posts: 7,771 ✭✭✭Mark Hamill


    antiskeptic wrote: »
    I don't do SNIP's, not least because you've snipped out the bit which shows they don't amount to the same thing.

    What was snipped doesn't change the accuracy of what you said. Your two sentences amount to the same thing - you accept claims about reality based on what personally satisfies you above all else.
    antiskeptic wrote: »
    I might accept a unfair pay cut. I wouldn't find it satisfactory. I might accept a fair pay cut. I would find that satisfactory.

    So no, I don't mean acceptance.

    If you keep working then you do find it satisfactory.
    By admitting it might not make you happy, you reinforce that satisfaction just means acceptance. So when you said your worldview "satisfies me the most", you were being redundant, you were just saying that your worldview is what you accept your worldview to be.
    antiskeptic wrote: »
    You've hopped from satisfaction to happy for some strange reason. As pointed out, satisfaction is neutral, it doesn't matter whether the satisfaction makes one happy or sad. Satisfaction is concerned with how well the overall mechanism (constructed from all the information available) works. The best mechanism is the most satisfactory.

    Now that's subjective of course: people still buy German cars and German cars aren't reliable.

    But since we're all in the subjective boat, that's hardly a dealbreaker.

    I'm following your jumps, between satisfaction meaning acceptance and satisfaction meaning something which pleases you (makes you happy) when you pick on,e I'll stick to it.
    antiskeptic wrote: »
    Presumably the motivation would stem from lack of satisfaction with the current model.

    The motivation would stem from the lack of accuracy of the current model. I am regularly dissatisfied with the current model, I would like all my wishes to come true just by making them vaguely skyward and a magic person up there doing them for me. Unfortunately, reality doesn't care and fortunately I am not so arrogant as to think it should.


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    #369
    Mark Hamill
    Registered Users Posts: 7,771 ✭✭✭Mark Hamill


    antiskeptic wrote: »
    You said that, not me. I wouldn't dream of saying that you can't be Irish without already being Irish.

    You literally said that exact sentence right here.
    If that is the level of reality re-imagining you are going to engage in then discussion just is not possible.
    antiskeptic wrote: »
    As stated: As to why I can hold myself right whilst there are others with contradictory views to mine, including you. What of it? What do I care what other people think, in any conclusive sense

    In general, if you and someone else are equally confident in your contradictory worldviews, and the criteria you both use for those worldviews are the same, then the criteria is not sufficient by itself to decide which worldview is more accurate. You can't both be right and what makes you wrong is not going to be discovered by your common criteria.

    Specific to your worldview, you believe that god has opened your eyes and other theists are mistaken despite their convictions. How do you know your eyes have actually been opened by God and not Satan? How do you know you have been tricked and someone else actually has it right?

    Not to mention, people act based on their beliefs. Someone might believe that you belief is dangerous and that you should be punished or suppressed. Wouldn't you need to understand their beliefs to successfully defend yours and contradict them?

    Either way, is it not a good idea to consider why people think and to challenge your own beliefs? That is why I started the thread, to challenge mine.
    antiskeptic wrote: »
    I conclude I'm right based on self satisfaction. As do you. I don't need to answer the question to anyone but myself.

    But your continued posting here without answering the question makes it seem like you can't answer the question, even to yourself. What is the difference between someone who can answer a question but never will, and someone who can't? Nothing at all, to everyone who is not that person.
    And it is doubly looking like that when your justification to starting with the conclusion that you are right in order to conclude that you are right is that it satisfies you to be right.


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    #370
    Seanachai
    Registered Users Posts: 2,538 ✭✭✭Seanachai


    Mark Hamill wrote: »
    You literally said that exact sentence right here.
    If that is the level of reality re-imagining you are going to engage in then discussion just is not possible.


    In general, if you and someone else are equally confident in your contradictory worldviews, and the criteria you both use for those worldviews are the same, then the criteria is not sufficient by itself to decide which worldview is more accurate. You can't both be right and what makes you wrong is not going to be discovered by your common criteria.

    Specific to your worldview, you believe that god has opened your eyes and other theists are mistaken despite their convictions. How do you know your eyes have actually been opened by God and not Satan? How do you know you have been tricked and someone else actually has it right?

    Not to mention, people act based on their beliefs. Someone might believe that you belief is dangerous and that you should be punished or suppressed. Wouldn't you need to understand their beliefs to successfully defend yours and contradict them?

    Either way, is it not a good idea to consider why people think and to challenge your own beliefs? That is why I started the thread, to challenge mine.


    But your continued posting here without answering the question makes it seem like you can't answer the question, even to yourself. What is the difference between someone who can answer a question but never will, and someone who can't? Nothing at all, to everyone who is not that person.
    And it is doubly looking like that when your justification to starting with the conclusion that you are right in order to conclude that you are right is that it satisfies you to be right.

    The mystery schools or noetic sciences as they were called used to work with systems of initiation. Right back to the stone age they used the retrieval of symbols from dreams or trance states to verify their worthiness to go further into the mysteries. The Native Americans use this system to match up mates and the Tibetans to select the reincarnation of the Dalai Lama.

    I'd have a lot more respect for this system than people claiming that 'x' is they way and it is the only way to salvation, heaven etc.


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    #371
    Seanachai
    Registered Users Posts: 2,538 ✭✭✭Seanachai


    Hotblack Desiato wrote: »
    Like they said, stalemating and proselytising.




    Yes, of course I do!

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=InXwZc4RS7M

    HIT THE NORTH!


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    #372
    antiskeptic
    Registered Users Posts: 9,555 ✭✭✭antiskeptic


    Seanachai wrote: »
    Do you believe in the fall? As in the battle in heaven and Lucifer etc?


    Sure. That's not to say that the fall couldn't be a picture of a process of establishing a choice given to free willed agents. This, in order to let them decide whether they wanted to relate to Love or not. To choose "not" requires that "not" have some sort of legs to enable choice, some attractive quality. Those legs are the antithesis of Love: Evil.

    But the account works well enough, both in the context you mention and through the larger biblical picture for it to be actual and not just a picture.


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    #373
    antiskeptic
    Registered Users Posts: 9,555 ✭✭✭antiskeptic


    Fourier wrote: »
    "Yeah, but how can you even know anything. Maybe it doesn't even have a stomach and it's all a hallucination man".

    That's one way to illustrate it - a fairly typical way.

    Another could see you in a windowless room walking from one end to the other, figuring your are travelling in a direction, when in reality, the room is in a plane and you're actually travelling in the other direction. The people in the room who know its a plane would be your scientists, you would be LSD-man.

    I agree the conversation (in one sense) stops. But what is being addressed is the presumption (yours and that of others on here) that you are the scientists and I'm LSD-man.

    It could just as easily be the other way around and there is no way for one side to elevate their view above the others.

    The aim of stalemating is to puncture the A&A presumption-of-superiority bubble. The very one you yourself expressed with your LSD man caricature



    What paradox is this? There might be a problem in the grounding of epistemology, but I'm not aware of a paradox.

    You appeared to be when you said this

    "As I thought, you're basically just referring to old well known problems/paradoxes in epistemology."


    Issues with the grounding of epistomology imply the Christian conception of God? How is that?

    It was just a statement from someone who knows we're flying in a plane. Withdrawn.


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    #374
    antiskeptic
    Registered Users Posts: 9,555 ✭✭✭antiskeptic


    Mark Hamill wrote: »
    You literally said that exact sentence right here.
    If that is the level of reality re-imagining you are going to engage in then discussion just is not possible.

    Holy cow.

    That Irish/Irish sentence was a paraphrasing of your "believe God to believe God sentence".

    Yes "I said it". But since it's a paraphrase of something you said, you, in effect, said it.


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    #375
    smacl
    Moderators, Society & Culture Moderators Posts: 15,716 Mod ✭✭✭✭smacl


    antiskeptic wrote: »
    Holy cow.

    That Irish/Irish sentence was a paraphrasing of your "believe God to believe God sentence".

    Yes "I said it". But since it's a paraphrase of something you said, you, in effect, said it.

    You're talking nonsense though. In response to Mark Hamill's "You are saying that you can't believe in god without already believing in god" you said;
    antiskeptic wrote: »
    Although I'm not saying that, it is self evident. I can't be Irish without already being Irish. To be Irish means you must be Irish.

    Yet you also stated that earlier in your life you did not believe in God in the way you do now, so you became a believer through the process of being born again. You know, in the same way you can't become Irish. Direct contradiction of yourself as I see it.


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    #376
    smacl
    Moderators, Society & Culture Moderators Posts: 15,716 Mod ✭✭✭✭smacl


    antiskeptic wrote: »
    The aim of stalemating is to puncture the A&A presumption-of-superiority bubble. The very one you yourself expressed with your LSD man caricature
    antiskeptic wrote: »
    I went through a phase of taking mushrooms (although I didn't have a God/god experience that I can recall). You do get a sense that our undrugged perceptions, whilst taken as the the "standard" guide to the limits of reality, are potentially limited.

    Says the only poster on the thread that has freely admitted to taking hallucinogens. Your confused and circuitous logic is doing little more than tripping you up. First time I've seen anyone going for a stalemate in a game of pigeon chess :)


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    #377
    Fourier
    Registered Users Posts: 10,558 ✭✭✭✭Fourier


    antiskeptic wrote: »
    That's one way to illustrate it - a fairly typical way.

    Another could see you in a windowless room walking from one end to the other, figuring your are travelling in a direction, when in reality, the room is in a plane and you're actually travelling in the other direction. The people in the room who know its a plane would be your scientists, you would be LSD-man.
    That's not really the analogy. LSD-man is somebody who halts all debate with impassable philosophically reductive statements, not somebody who just happens to be wrong.

    So when the scientists in my example disagree and no evidence can determine who is right currently, then neither is superior to the other in this debate. That's an interesting stalemate.

    However the man just saying "Yeah but how do you even know etc" is just being unproductive. It's a kind of stalemate that can be done all the time about anything. "Maybe the duck is actually a guy called Gary, all you have is your personal satisfaction with your sensory correlates, so that's just as valid man"
    antiskeptic wrote: »
    You appeared to be when you said this

    "As I thought, you're basically just referring to old well known problems/paradoxes in epistemology."
    You're referring to a specific issue:
    "the paradox of mans knowledge resting in himself"

    There are paradoxes in epistemology in general, but what is the paradox here?


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    #378
    Mark Hamill
    Registered Users Posts: 7,771 ✭✭✭Mark Hamill


    antiskeptic wrote: »
    Holy cow.

    That Irish/Irish sentence was a paraphrasing of your "believe God to believe God sentence".

    Yes "I said it". But since it's a paraphrase of something you said, you, in effect, said it.

    No, you and only you said it when you gave it as an example of something, like "believing in god in order to believe in god", that is self evident.
    To remind you of the full context of what you said:
    "Although I'm not saying [you can't believe in god without already believing in god], it is self evident. I can't be Irish without already being Irish. To be Irish means you must be Irish."


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    #379
    Mark Hamill
    Registered Users Posts: 7,771 ✭✭✭Mark Hamill


    antiskeptic wrote: »
    The aim of stalemating is to puncture the A&A presumption-of-superiority bubble.

    How, exactly, do you think stalemating actually accomplishes that?
    -You hardly thought we were superior before the thread started, so stalemating isn't going to change that for that you.
    -If you simply won't answer a question (i.e. not can't, but won't), then we have no reason to change our opinion of our beliefs, so stalemating won't change us.

    Stalemating can't do what you assert it will do. You would have to be more than generous to even assume our "presumption-of-superiority" won't just increase with your stalemating.


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    #380
    antiskeptic
    Registered Users Posts: 9,555 ✭✭✭antiskeptic


    It's 'harvest time' in my line of work.

    Apols for the lack of posting of late. I'll be back when the harvest is in ☺


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    #381
    Bannasidhe
    Moderators, Society & Culture Moderators Posts: 19,219 Mod ✭✭✭✭Bannasidhe


    antiskeptic wrote: »
    It's 'harvest time' in my line of work.

    Apols for the lack of posting of late. I'll be back when the harvest is in ☺

    Hope it's a good one this year.
    Last 2 years have been hit and miss due to the weather.


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    #382
    antiskeptic
    Registered Users Posts: 9,555 ✭✭✭antiskeptic


    Bannasidhe wrote: »
    Hope it's a good one this year.
    Last 2 years have been hit and miss due to the weather.

    Thanks.

    I'm more a property harvester than an agricultural one. Market has flattened but it ain't slipping so should continue to put food on the table..


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