So the idea is that if there is, in fact, some overlap between the divine and the physical, then knowledge could pass between the divine and the physical. Now, we have the problem of discovering how this
could be so. I'm not sure, myself. In fact, I argue against it forcefully to find out if such an interface could topple my currently held radical notion that gods are impossible.

Note, of course, that the sensationalistic "gods are impossible" is just an entertaining prelude to spirited debate, and not a serious estimation of the status of pharaohs.

Again, a non-interaction with the brain causing "revelation" is fairly unclear. I say "non-interaction" because the mechanisms of the brain are observable, but the deity as defined doesn't interact with the observable world, and thus not the brain.

It would be question begging if each of the assumptions you mentioned were exactly the same assumption. I don't know if that's necessarily always the case.

What's interesting is that even though your statement makes it seem as if epistemological processes could all be said to be equal in terms of success, they aren't. If our epistemologies all boil down to an orgy of question begging, then why are some more successful than others?

It makes sense, I just fear a nonsensical conclusion. Once we've determined that to be a god is a whole host of possible things, then we can say that, for instance, gods exist as long as they're pharaohs.

Of course not. But all god-talk that I've encountered is meaningless for one reason or another, so it colours my view of things. For instance, with the pharaohs, my first reaction is "yeah, but they're just men". It's hardly a comprehensive argument, but it appeals to the minimalist in me. To address the possibility of an overlap between the divine and the physical, we would be in an area where I believe the danger would be talking about things we have no access to (specifically, the divine), leading us to a terribly circular position.

How do we know about the divine if we have no interaction with it? If we do have interaction with it, is the divine physical in one moment, and not in another? How would we know these things without physical interaction? etc.

ubuntuAnyone wrote:

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I type a post on a Windows machine, and what do I get??? grr...

HisWillness wrote:

Again, a non-interaction with the brain causing "revelation" is fairly unclear. I say "non-interaction" because the mechanisms of the brain are observable, but the deity as defined doesn't interact with the observable world, and thus not the brain.

This depends on how much of the brain someone wants to make mind, as some think that the essence of the mind is not restricted to the organ in one's skull.

Recalling our conversation on empiricism, it would be like validating empiricism empirically. Probably not necessarily, but what Gödel showed is that some assumptions could be shown to be true using other assumptions although they are valid assumptions in and of themselves. This could create high degrees of circularity. Where would one begin? At least with empiricism, things stack up nicely where one thing or a combination of things leads to another.

All this is to say that without careful evaluations of particulars or smaller sets than "all gods", we could easily fall into the traps of hasty generalization or bifurcation.

Concerning the overlap, I think a large portion of the overlap is contingent on what the particular deity claimed to be and if what it was doing in the physical world lined up with its claim--a consistency check of sort.

HisWillness wrote:

I'm not sure we've ever heard directly from a deity, so that might be difficult. Do you mean comparing religious texts to reality in some way?

That's one way to do it. I'm not suggesting we try in this forum because I honestly do not feel like playing devil's advocate (or a god's advocate ) for any particular religion. Angelobrazil or Luminon may be better people to have this sort of discussion with for their particular religions.

I'd think of it in the terms of the union of sets. Should the unobservable world reveal itself such that it was observable, then if would be a union of these two worlds, but it would have to be observable to be revealed in an observable world, thereby maintaining the dichotomy. The contention here though would be on the matter of discerning the two apart. If the unobservable world came into the observable world and existed in the same manner one might expect things of the observable world to behave, then there would be no discernable difference. But if it did not behave in the same manner one might expect it to, then we could conclude either that my understanding of the observable world is wrong (that is lacking or blatantly wrong), or this is not something of the observable world, which is the Humean definition a miracle.

Some sort of dualism might satisfy this.

Many religions suggest that the essence of a person is not merely physical, but also spiritual.

But this again is not necessarily empirically detectable, and really contingent upon the success of the establishment of transcendence.

But at the same time I'm not going to throw everything else out the window in favor of it as this would be a more holistic epistemology.

I'd think of it in the terms of the union of sets. Should the unobservable world reveal itself such that it was observable, then if would be a union of these two worlds, but it would have to be observable to be revealed in an observable world, thereby maintaining the dichotomy.

A follower a given religion usually his or her religion as the arbiter of truth, otherwise he probably would not be a follower.  I suppose your reference to things “already written down” is a reference to your particular religion’s teachings. Per the topic at hand, I’m not really interested in delving into the particulars of your’s or anyone else’s religion because I fear it would detract from the focus.

Don't label everything you don't understand as a religion. Don't underestimate people's ability to observe and work with facts. What is written down, are both original teachings, and researches of people, which confirm the original theories, by the way. We are no followers. We verify everything in practice and our results give sense with the rest of the world and other researches. It's not a separated religion, but an unified 'theory of everything'. This is why I think it's worthy of study, it transcends all minor and contradictory teachings and religions.

I can not detract you from the focus, because you have no focus.  If you only theoretize, you can be wrong just as well as right. Instead of theoretizing, you should gather practical results. It is absurd to judge if something is "internally incoherent". The world just is, regardless how incoherent or counter-intuitive it's properties may seem to us, or if we like it or not. There is more than enough of data in global publications to compile a statistical overview about the structure of things like human spirit, invisible worlds, and so on. There is no need to be stuck with guesswork.

The "problem" would be for someone to demonstrate why the soul explanation is the best available explanation. In the absence of evidence AND a compelling reason to believe that such an entity should be considered, the dualist has an uphill climb. What, exactly, is not accounted for that the soul explanation gives us?

But the empirical method holds up logically as well. So I'm not sure what you would need, or what you feel is missing. Given that an empiricist is simply someone who tests carefully, the available knowledge to that person is what can be tested carefully. Of course, nobody's actually a strictly perfect empiricist. We also use reasoning.

[edit: I suppose I should clarify that the empiricist I'm talking about here is a kind of reliabilist empiricist, and so the above was hastily applied to all empiricism, which wouldn't be accurate]

One place to use reasoning is the idea of things that are impossible to test. I don't mean limited by our current technology, I mean completely impossible to test no matter what technology we might develop. In our discussion, we've called it "unobservable", and when I say that, I mean literally impossible to observe by any means.
Given our relationship to the unobservable, we have no way to talk about it in a way that would make sense at all. Statements about the unobservable would have to be based on ideas borrowed from our observable world, as there is no other way for us to consider it. In doing so, we place a huge supposition on the unknown.
So when you talk about sets of the observable and unobservable, it's a bit difficult to say that the unobservable would even participate in a process of being part of a set. It's such an unknown that applying the concept of set to it may not apply.

I think this is why I'm repeating myself. I don't understand what you're suggesting. Historical evidence where gods are concerned are holy books or myths. Maybe it should be a more specific question: how do we tell the difference between "authentic" religious experiences and pure fantasy?

Maybe you've seen one, but I haven't. I've read a lot of the Bible, some Koran, some Buddhist texts, etc., but while there are lots of quaint metaphors (and odd instructions), there really isn't anything that maps to reality. I mean apart from the assumption that the characters are human, but that happens in fiction, too.

I'm afraid I can't let this part slide by. You're suggesting that the solution to the "synergistic relationship" between the brain and its contents is a ... what, exactly?

I guess you are okay with that. My curiosity is still fairly active, though, and my copy of "Correlative Neuroanatomy" seems to get by fine without mention of anything other than the brain and its biochemistry. So where is the naturalistic explanation lacking philosophically?

Still not sure about the nature of your dissatisfaction, though. What exactly needs to be validated?

That's my mistake for getting fast and loose with the terminology. I should have been clear that I endorse a scientific empiricism in line with Popper's principle of falsification.

Maybe I haven't been clear on the intractability of the problem. If something is beyond the limits of empirical observation permanently, then one cannot assume it would fit into a set. There exists an infinity of possibilities for an unknown. If, however, something is merely unobserved (that is, we may at some point be able to observe it given adequate technology, etc.) then it's safe to say that it would fit into a set, as there is good reason to believe that observable things will exhibit behavior consistent with the rest of the observable universe.

Is the credibility of the witness really an issue when, on one hand, we have three hundred years of hard physical evidence support consistent behavior of matter, and on the other, we have one person's claim that the consistent behavior of matter has become inconsistent temporarily? It's not just a little unlikely, it's extremely unlikely.

I don't mean to be rude, but I won't consider fictional accounts in a discussion about ontology. It's not being snarky or anything, I just think it muddies the waters.

In the case of a physicalist like me, it would take a simple falsification of my main assumption that the physical is, and other things have not adequately been shown to be.

No offense, but it's really mysterious to me, how you and Will can discuss things without actually caring about them, it's so.....strange, that it is almost fascinating, if it wouldn't be so tedious. It's like two permanently blind people would try to invent the notion of colors, but only philosophically. In that example, I don't know where the goal is, but I'm sure that it's not seeing the colors.

I think this is worth discussing, because AFAIK philosophy, religion and esotericism are different things.

OK. Just perhaps at some moment, try to summarize what you have discovered together, if you have discovered something, and if it was a purpose of all this to discover anything at all.

 

But our ideas aren't the same from person to person, and it is because we don't share the same brain. You need only point to miscommunication to see that demonstrated. Even when clear communication takes place, each person has his or her own conception of something, omitting and including different details. Anecdotally, you can try that on any number of friends you like: just ask them to describe a mouse. You all know what the class of things qualifying as "mouse" is, but none of you will have the exact same conception.

 

 

Then you're suggesting that ideas are made of something, but it's something indeterminate, that doesn't present itself physiologically?

 

 

You could read Oliver Sacks if you want a more entertaining version of neurology. Also more in keeping with the state of the art, frankly (and he just writes books for a lay audience). I wasn't even aware that Richard Dawkins (if that's the Dawkins you mean) was active in the neuro-sciences. I suppose it's predictable that he'd have a genetic take on it, though. Dennett's work being philosophical, I can see your interest there.

 

I don't see that in your criticism. Your contention is that he's making an argument by analogue, so maybe you haven't presented your real criticism. I doubt you mean that dualism solves the problem of argument by analogue.

 

 

Y'know, the conversation isn't going to get any less civil if you announce that you're a dualist. I'll still argue the point with you, but unless you suddenly become unhinged (unlikely), I can assure you that I consider these discussions entertaining diversions from staring at financial charts, and won't give you some kind of "Aha! I've got you! You're insane!" moment.

 

 

That said, I think we might have to define these "other sources" of information. I've argued that we have the ability to get some quality control with empirical observation, in that we're clear on the domain we're addressing. With "other sources", we're in a whole range of dubious material.

 

 

Okay, a single thing that doesn't behave consistently with the rest of the observable universe. How many rules does the thing break, exactly?

 

 

Absolutely. We're not talking about exhaustive knowledge of a specific event, here. With the relationship between claims and belief, it's so unlikely that the behaviour of the physical world changed temporarily that to believe such things would put one closer to a crazy person than sane.

 

But for rational behaviour in a counter-example, take the recent discovery of high-temperature superconductivity (the 80s is sort-of recent): nobody believed the first researchers who discovered that superconductivity could occur above 30 K. The mathematical model just wouldn't have it. But evidence of the behaviour produced a quick turn-around, and then an explosion of interest.

 

So it really depends on the type of thing we're talking about, and the quality of evidence (which, of course, is limited to supporting an idea, and not proving that it is true).

 

The problem is determining authenticity without some kind of reasonable evidence.

 

I think this may be a confusion with problems with language rather than a problem with ideas.

I'm not sure what ideas are made of, but I do not think it is merely physiologically but I'm not sure that it's independent of physiology either--a dilemma or sort.

Dawkins wrote on information theory (calling it memetics) and theory of the mind in his books The Selfish Gene and The Devil's Chaplain. He does not spend a great deal of time talking about physiology but building an analogy between genetics (his area of expertise) and information.

See my dilemma above if you want to know where I stand (or fall if you prefer). I think these are kind of fun, and a break from staring at computer code all day. Perhaps I am insane because I can't make up my mind.

I'm willing to scrutinize it, but not because it does not fit into my preferred mode of epistemic evaluation.

1 or more I suppose. But the appearance of breaking rules would not be the same thing as breaking rules.

Right. Hume dismisses miracles (magic, if you please) by the credulity of the witnesses (i.e. uneducated people) and the few number of witnesses. He things it would be irrational for a more sophisticated person to believe such thinks happened based on the testimony of such things. I was suggesting in the face of good evidence and numerous, credible witnesses, what would we do. Would we still dismiss such things?

No, I'm talking about how people hold ideas in their heads. I'm not talking about equivocation (which would be the mistake you mention about confusing a live mouse with a pointing device). Different people hold the same idea in their heads differently. Get someone to describe a mouse, and everyone will pick different details to give you first, and the range and variety of details will show the disparity.

We may call the idea of the mouse the same, but you were talking about how the ideas are held in the brain. I would contend that they're not stored the same way in each brain, and the proposition that they are stored exactly the same leaves a question of "how" that is not solved by an "immaterial" idea.

That's apart from the fact that "immaterial" is incoherent to communicate.

It's not really a dilemma if you're just saying you don't know. "Merely phisiological" leaves the question "what else, then?" What other than physiological?

Okay, it's no wonder it's not a good explanation to you, philosophically. It's not a philosophical explanation. Dennett's ideas I can see, but again, if he's making an argument from analogue, then it fails, and we don't have to consider it. But just because two authors (really, one) haven't given you a naturalistic neurology, that doesn't mean the naturalistic or physicalist view of supervenience of the mind to the brain is invalid.

So what IS your preferred mode of epistemic evaluation?

Legally, no. Scientifically, yes. Witnesses are notoriously unreliable, and can be easily misled, regardless of their level of sophistication.

Eloise wrote:

I'd ask you to scrap the supervenience model and consider the essential attributes of matter as a complete description of intellect.

How do we avoid the problem of that being a simple case of projection?

What I mean is, when we decide that the universe is intellect, and we also differentiate between a horse's intellect and ours? Is this a radical departure from the common definition of intellect?

But that appears to be an issue of the meaning of "intellect".

Eloise wrote:

In the context of relativity "the universe" is not ordered in time, evidently it is only perception which is ordered this way as a proportion of c.

And our perception is lined up with entropy. What can we make of that? (It's not a leading question, I actually don't have an answer.)

Oh, I see. Okay. And did you mean time direction by that?

 How would we apply "extended knowledge"? I'm not sure what that means.

I used to play, to quote an old friend, "satanic nerd games" like  Dungeons and Dragons. In the game I would cast fireball spells. Suppose I were able to actually do this. Fireballs occur naturally, but this one was the product of magic. There would be no discernable difference between the effects of my magic fireball and the naturally occuring fireball. The discernment between magic and a natural phanomenon would then be contingent upon the witnesses.

No, it's the same type of thing. Keep in mind that we're talking about how people store ideas in their heads. They must do so in an approximating fashion, because storing information about every molecule of even the same mouse in our minds would be impossible for a human being. So we approximate. In the case of the general concept of "mouse", the approximation narrows the range of attributes.

So when you said earlier that we manage to have the same ideas in our heads despite not having the same brains, and that pointed to ideas being somehow separate from the brain, it's easy to demonstrate that it's simply not the case. Our approximations are easily shown to be different.

I wasn't talking about physical things in the OP, so it wasn't a slippery slope towards "everything" collapsing into meaningless. I was talking about things that have no reason to be considered interactive parts of the physical world. The idea that we can even discuss those things is suspect, as the way we form our ideas relies heavily upon our experience of physical interaction.

Except that "immaterial" is incoherent. There's no paradox between something that is determinate and something that is indeterminate. We can determine the behaviour of matter, but there's nothing that we can say about the "immaterial" that won't be baseless nonsense, because we don't even have a way to ground a priori knowledge in something completely mysterious. A posteriori knowledge is more obviously lacking.

Not so fast. You're suggesting that the way we communicate that idea IS the idea itself. In your scenario, we both make a mathematical assertion using our shared convention for asserting such things. That says nothing about how the idea is stored in our heads, which is what we're discussing.

If the two brains needed to exist to keep the idea going, then the idea depends on the brains, does it not? The argument that ideas are things in and of themselves would require that they could exist outside of communication. Communication, after all, is a physical act.

How do you reconcile a correspondence theory of knowledge with Popper's falsification? It seems like on the correspondence theory (or at least many forms of it -- you haven't been specific) Popper would be creating an asymmetry with his non-commutative truth value.

Both witnesses and hermeneutics are unreliable from a philosophically evidence-based point of view. Not "can be", but "are". And notoriously so. 30 or so witnesses watched David Copperfield make the Statue of Liberty disappear. Obviously it didn't, but they would have to testify that it did.

As for hermeneutics, Heidegger and Gadamer hit the nail on the head by arguing that a text was an attempt to communicate the experience of the writer to the reader (broadly speaking). Thus, in matters of truth and falsity, hermeneutics is largely unhelpful. We can form a context, but not necessarily a measure of reliability. That's unavailable to us, making historical documents a step down from archeological finds, which are themselves generally incomplete.

Thomathy wrote:

If the discernment is contingent upon the witness and the difference between the effects is indiscernible, then I wonder about the difference in the phenomena themselves.  In any case if the phenomenon occurs, then it is necessarily natural.  Calling it magic and meaning what magic has hence forth meant would only be playing word games.

The difference would be cause...one cause is natural, the other non-natural, namely magic.

 

 

I do not think that works, because in our whittling of attributes to converge on an idea, the general concept would have to be independent of the brain containing it because it would have to be an abstracted from the molecules in the brains.

HisWillness wrote:

Except that "immaterial" is incoherent. There's no paradox between something that is determinate and something that is indeterminate. We can determine the behaviour of matter, but there's nothing that we can say about the "immaterial" that won't be baseless nonsense, because we don't even have a way to ground a priori knowledge in something completely mysterious. A posteriori knowledge is more obviously lacking.

I'm not trying to ground a priori truth, rather only assert what is necessary in order to make sense of the world that I presume to exist. I think I have to do this in before I can even begin to assert anything about the world.

I'm suggesting the idea only needs one brain to exist, but it exists independent of the number of brains, so any given brain may contain the idea, but is itself not necessary for the idea to persist, save one brain. That creates a paradox.

As far as I can tell, your concern with non-communtative truth values is outside the scope of Popper's falsification because empirical observation is limited to a posteriori truth claims. This is not really asymmetry but a limit, and generally why I consider empirical modes a sub-discipline of a more holistic epistemology.

If witnesses and hermeneutics are unreliable, then evidence itself is unreliable, because inevitably evidence, not just events, is hermeneutically filtered by those examining it.

Thomathy wrote:

What exactly would 'non-natural' be?

I'm trying to wade through the barrage of questions. I think this is really what you are asking.

But really,  what is so hard to understand about it? Non-natural causes would be causes that originate from non-natural agents...gods, demon, pixies, djinns, some sort of spiritual force channeled by some mere mortal. If you want to use your definition of natural, perhaps these entities exist in another plane of existence. I can imagine any number of things. Pick one. Imaginations are quite good at coming up with ideas that are not actual. I never said it actually had to exist, as it was purely  counterfactual.

One things pertaining to the OP and this too, if one wanted to, one could turn the table on the one crying, "meaningless" saying any sort of attempt to rebut the claim of a god or pink unicorn or fairy is meaningless because such a person does not understand what he is talking about. So ultimately, I think such sort of discussions are zero sum.

No doubt...but we cannot say that an idea and the way an idea is communicated are the same thing.

I was answering the part concerning grounding for a priori knowledge. My contention here was answered elsewhere I believe, in that an idea can exist independent of the brain containing it.

It's not that an idea exists outside a brain, but that an idea exists independently of many brains yet needs a brain to exist. Does that make sense?

Yes, my concern is with a priori truth. A priori truth is what you said, "definitionally obvious truths" and its byproducts--truths formed based on these "definitionally obvious truths". Because Popper's concern had to do with empirical induction, he promoted falsification has a mode to eliminate ad hoc explanations, such as explanations invoking a god-of-the-gaps explanation.

Traditionally, hermeneutics have been applied to textual analysis, but more recently the study of interpretation has been applied more broadly to all sorts of information sciences.

Indeed testing should eliminate such things and I'm all for careful tests, but they nevertheless introduce their own problems: faulty premises, small sample sizes, sample bias, false conclusions, hasty generalizations, and bias in interpretation of results.

Additionally one does not always have the luxury of applying tests, such as in the case of historical events.

A group of witnesses independently reporting a given event, even if they are only marginally reliable (suppose they only told the truth half the time) can be remarkably reliable. The probability of six such persons (some cite this as smallest reliable sample size) independently reporting an event is less %2.

Likewise, a friend of mine in the legal profession questions the validity of witnesses who all report an event the same way because it tends to indicated that they were getting their information from a single source.

I'm not cutting down evidence per se, but contending that evidence is subject to interpretations (that is hermeneutics are being applied to it), and therefore subject to the same problems witnesses are subject to.