Religious Typology Quiz

Cypress said:
I just had three notifications of responses from you, and I can't keep up, I have other fish to fry.

If you don't believe there are any open questions about freedom, knowledge, equality, justice, beauty that's fine.

Your position just happens to run counter to thousands of years of human intellectual history.

What I am saying is that these are open questions which have been debated by the greatest minds of the western intellectual tradition, and these are the types of questions which aren't resolvable by test tubes and equations.
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I apologize for bothering you with "disagreement". I thought you would be more amenable to discussion. And discussion really only works if the two sides have differences. Otherwise it is mutual masturbation.

Thanks for your patience with me, though.
 
NovoJank said:
Maybe I don't necessarily know what that sentence means. They are easily definable so what is the "question" around them? (I'm genuinely asking so that I might address my points more accurately).
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Socrates, Thomas Jefferson, Siddhartha Gautama, Karl Marx, Martin Luther King would all have different conceptions on the nature of freedom and equality than you do.

Whatever definition you have is not universal, neccessy, true, timeless, an unequivocal. Even dictionary definitions change over time.

Plato's Republic was almost entirely dedicated to questioning the nature of justice and reason.

John Locke, Renee Descartes, Immanuel Kant all had different theories of the nature of knowledge.

Karl Marx and John Stewart Mill had different conceptions of equality and fairness.

Jason Pollack and Michelangelo had radically different ideas about beauty and artistic truth.

If you feel you have certain, universal, timeless, and unequivocal knowledge of all these things all I can do is congratulate you.

I ask that you accept I believe there are open questions on these and many other topics that do not lend themselves to chemical or mathmatical analysis.

It feels to me that you are uncomfortable with anyone disagreeing with you. I don't mean to antagonize, but is it absolutely necessary to misrepresent my posts like this? I have NEVER claimed absolute certainty.

You seem to be 'mocking' my position as you feared I was doing with the "unicorn" example. I thought I had clarified that my example was in no way intended to mock.

My apologies if disagreements are difficult to deal with. I will attempt to moderate my posts so that they are not as antagonistic as you seem to feel they are. They are not intended to be so.
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I'm not remotely upset or bothered. I congratulate you for being a good contributor to this forum
 
Cypress said:
Socrates, Thomas Jefferson, Siddhartha Gautama, Karl Marx, Martin Luther King would all have different conceptions on the nature of freedom and equality than you do.
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If something is an "open question" it SURELY allows for people like me to have a different view from you, doesn't it?

If you feel you have certain, universal, timeless, and unequivocal knowledge of all these things all I can do is congratulate you.
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Why do you INSIST on misrepresenting my position? I have NEVER ONCE claimed superior knowledge. NOT ONCE. I haven't even claimed my position is ispo facto correct.

What I do note is that you don't like to engage on my points but would rather just list philosopher names in response.
 
NovoJank said:
More complex? That's a tough one to claim. Our biology is clearly DIFFERENT from a reptiles and I will gladly agree that our brain is more complex in that it has more parts. I will also gladly agree that we are more complex than amoebas. But is "complexity" a measure of "sophistication" or even "advancement"? Amoebas have been here longer than we ever will and will probably outlast us. As such it doesn't feel like this "sophistication" we have attained will be a bellwether of "success" such as it is.



But I think we can both agree that neither is "better" in terms of survival which is the only metric evolution can be judged by. There are still monostomes and they've been around longer than we have and probably will outlast us as well.

Perhaps the discussion should be around "why do more complex creatures have more holes"
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There are a few theories on it.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4427860/
Complexity, Natural Selection and the Evolution of Life and Humans
. The suggested model implies that complexity is cumulatively increasing, giving evolution a direction, an arrow of time, thus also implying that the latest emerging species will be the one with the highest level of complexity. Since the human species is the last species evolved in the evolutionary process seen at large, this means that we are the species with the highest complexity. The model implies that the human species constitutes an integral part of organic evolution, yet rendering us the exclusive status as the species of the highest complexity.
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Agreed survival is key. Consider which species is most likely to mitigate an impact event or super volcano: humans or worms?

While worms, being less complex, may be more able to survive an impact event or super volcano, that depends upon the magnitude of destruction of the event. Clearly being off-planet or being able to stop the event is better for survival.

When our Sun becomes a Red Giant in a few billion years, the worms will be smoked, but, if still around, human beings will find a way to survive through evacuation.
 
Doc Dutch said:
There are a few theories on it.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4427860/
Complexity, Natural Selection and the Evolution of Life and Humans


Agreed survival is key. Consider which species is most likely to mitigate an impact event or super volcano: humans or worms?

While worms, being less complex, may be more able to survive an impact event or super volcano, that depends upon the magnitude of destruction of the event. Clearly being off-planet or being able to stop the event is better for survival.

When our Sun becomes a Red Giant in a few billion years, the worms will be smoked, but, if still around, human beings will find a way to survive through evacuation.
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I think one of the keys to the discussion is in the article you cited:

"However, there is a problem with all discussions of complexity in that there is no definition generally agreed on."

This is problematic, but more problematic still is the contention that evolution shows "...a direction, an arrow of time". Those two things coupled together might lead one to a significant form of bias assuming that "complexity" is somehow more valuable. Or that evolution has a "direction", when clearly evolution does NOT have a direction. Evolution is nothing if not conservative and would clearly be fine with single celled organisms that survived in their niche.

Now, maybe the author is merely using "complexity" (as he has chosen to define it) as measure of some narrowly defined window of development rather than an overall measure of "evolution". Evolution seems to be relatively agnostic about the need for complexity since the simplest life forms are still with us and probably far more successful in the game of survival than any of the complex life forms that came after it.


In many ways this echoes the "Intelligent Design" debate in that it hypothesizes that there is some indicator of "design" that is generally not agreed on and is almost always a self-generated metric and then leverages that self-generated metric to confirm the bias of finding "Design" where no such design is necessary.
 
NovoJank said:
I think one of the keys to the discussion is in the article you cited:

"However, there is a problem with all discussions of complexity in that there is no definition generally agreed on."

This is problematic, but more problematic still is the contention that evolution shows "...a direction, an arrow of time". Those two things coupled together might lead one to a significant form of bias assuming that "complexity" is somehow more valuable. Or that evolution has a "direction", when clearly evolution does NOT have a direction. Evolution is nothing if not conservative and would clearly be fine with single celled organisms that survived in their niche.

Now, maybe the author is merely using "complexity" (as he has chosen to define it) as measure of some narrowly defined window of development rather than an overall measure of "evolution". Evolution seems to be relatively agnostic about the need for complexity since the simplest life forms are still with us and probably far more successful in the game of survival than any of the complex life forms that came after it.


In many ways this echoes the "Intelligent Design" debate in that it hypothesizes that there is some indicator of "design" that is generally not agreed on and is almost always a self-generated metric and then leverages that self-generated metric to confirm the bias of finding "Design" where no such design is necessary.
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Disagreed that Natural Law = Intelligent Design. The Universe has defined laws. There's a difference between studying and understanding those laws versus trying to understand how those laws came to be.

Trying to mix the two concepts is simply muddying the waters, IMO.
 
Doc Dutch said:
Disagreed that Natural Law = Intelligent Design. The Universe has defined laws. There's a difference between studying and understanding those laws versus trying to understand how those laws came to be.

Trying to mix the two concepts is simply muddying the waters, IMO.
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No, I didn't explain my comparison well. What I meant was that throwing around the word "complexity" as if there is something deeper to be inferred as to the structure of nature is similar to how people throw around the word "design" as if there is an indicator of some deeper structure to nature (ie a "designer").

Both arguments suffer from the difficulty around agreeing on an actual definition before hand and can be leveraged to serve confirmation bias by the researcher.

That was all I meant by the comparison.
 
NovoJank said:
No, I didn't explain my comparison well. What I meant was that throwing around the word "complexity" as if there is something deeper to be inferred as to the structure of nature is similar to how people throw around the word "design" as if there is an indicator of some deeper structure to nature (ie a "designer").

Both arguments suffer from the difficulty around agreeing on an actual definition before hand and can be leveraged to serve confirmation bias by the researcher.

That was all I meant by the comparison.
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Dude, I have no clue what you are driving at.

History proves life on Earth keeps evolving into more sophisticated forms. The Red Queen hypothesis helps explain why it would evolve intelligence.
 
NovoJank said:
If something is an "open question" it SURELY allows for people like me to have a different view from you, doesn't it?



Why do you INSIST on misrepresenting my position? I have NEVER ONCE claimed superior knowledge. NOT ONCE. I haven't even claimed my position is ispo facto correct.

What I do note is that you don't like to engage on my points but would rather just list philosopher names in response.
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Pointing out that 3000 years of western intellectual history is a demonstration that my statements about the nature of knowledge, justice, freedom, equality, beauty, fairness is, and always has been, a very conventional approach to what we actually know as humans.

I honestly don't know how to respond to statements about invisible unicorns or to insinuations that laws of biology drive us inevitably towards freedom, equality, and justice.

I maintain that believing there are open questions about values, ethics, knowledge, the nature of being which are not amenable to solutions by conventional scientific experiment or mathmatical calculation.

I really don't think that is an extraordinary or radical thing to believe.
 
Cypress said:
I honestly don't know how to respond to statements about invisible unicorns
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Well, what about "invisible widgets"? That was my compromise. The question remains: why posit the existence of something that there is ZERO evidence for and no reason to require?

Why violate Ockham's Razor just for the possibility that there might be something more?

I maintain that believing there are open questions about values, ethics, knowledge, the nature of being which are not amenable to solutions by conventional scientific experiment or mathmatical calculation.
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Of course there are "open questions", but I'm showing you what one alternative explanation would look like. I thought that was the point of discussion. No one doubts that there are philosophers who have hashed over this stuff. I'm just presenting an alternative explanation. I am not saying it is necessarily correct, but it's called a "discussion" for a reason.

In the sciences there is a certain degree of "discipline" required. They are not allowed to suggest "miracles" for example (as a silly example, of course, but it helps me make the point). One of those disciplines is explaining ONLY those aspects which you have NEED to explain and have a REASON to explain. In other words no "extra complications that are not needed".

When one runs a statistical analysis of data one FITS the data. There is always "error" and some of that error is from known sources but some is from unknown sources and may just be random noise OR it could be a missing factor which explains that portion of the "error".

I'm suggesting that the "unknown bits", the "open questions" if you will, MAY just be random noise in the observations. Indeed it is possible that the model explains sufficient of the variability in the data to be as effective as it needs to be.

And "making guesses" as to what the unexplained variability is may be worthwhile and my be a waste of time. I can see the value of both sides.

I'm just trying to present a disciplined position that I can defend. To that end I have explained my position in great detail in hopes of this being an actual "discussion" and not just both of us pointing at lists of philosophers.

I get that it is frustrating in any conversation when someone has a different view. I have attempted at all points to present my view as clearly as possible.
 
NovoJank said:
Well, what about "invisible widgets"? That was my compromise. The question remains: why posit the existence of something that there is ZERO evidence for and no reason to require?

Why violate Ockham's Razor just for the possibility that there might be something more?



Of course there are "open questions", but I'm showing you what one alternative explanation would look like. I thought that was the point of discussion. No one doubts that there are philosophers who have hashed over this stuff. I'm just presenting an alternative explanation. I am not saying it is necessarily correct, but it's called a "discussion" for a reason.

In the sciences there is a certain degree of "discipline" required. They are not allowed to suggest "miracles" for example (as a silly example, of course, but it helps me make the point). One of those disciplines is explaining ONLY those aspects which you have NEED to explain and have a REASON to explain. In other words no "extra complications that are not needed".

When one runs a statistical analysis of data one FITS the data. There is always "error" and some of that error is from known sources but some is from unknown sources and may just be random noise OR it could be a missing factor which explains that portion of the "error".

I'm suggesting that the "unknown bits", the "open questions" if you will, MAY just be random noise in the observations. Indeed it is possible that the model explains sufficient of the variability in the data to be as effective as it needs to be.

And "making guesses" as to what the unexplained variability is may be worthwhile and my be a waste of time. I can see the value of both sides.

I'm just trying to present a disciplined position that I can defend. To that end I have explained my position in great detail in hopes of this being an actual "discussion" and not just both of us pointing at lists of philosophers.

I get that it is frustrating in any conversation when someone has a different view. I have attempted at all points to present my view as clearly as possible.
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I am attaching below my original point which started this off. I do not believe it is particularly radical. The reason I started citing the great minds of the western intellectual tradition is because it didn't seem like you knew these were open ended questions explored by the greatest minds in world history.

Cypress said:
^ This is a proposal which has been tested out by a few physicists.

The fact is, a only a minority of the questions we have involve protons, quarks, quasars, biochemistry.

Socrates and Plato knew there was more to the human experience than study of nature.

On a day to day routine basis, very few humans are asking questions about quantum mechanics, chemistry, or zoology.

The most important questions routinely on people's minds are questions about fairness, equality, justice, morality, freedom, charity, mercy, pride, humility, and just how to live a meaningful life
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As for widgets and unicorns, that doesn't make sense to me because it seems to presume all knowledge comes from sensory experience, which is a proposition that hasn't been widely accepted for a couple hundred years.
 
Perry Phimosis said:
How so? What did Descartes say about epistemology? I'm not that familiar with his epistemology apart from the Cogito which isn't really an epistemology.
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The body/mind split was a way to say the self (mind) knows the world through its own intuitions. Science functions through deductions. There are no physical facts about the way the self understands itself.
 
BidenPresident said:
What is it?
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an affirmation that the mind can be self-aware. According to the cogito it is effectively the ONLY thing that can be truly "known" as opposed to the "cosmic demon" in the conjecture creating a fake reality for us. Everything can be false and a simulation or fake but the mind can be self-aware so we know that our existence itself is not an illusion.

At least as I understand it. While that is a form of knowledge it doesn't really explain how one knows things other than the fact of one's own existence.
 
Perry Phimosis said:
an affirmation that the mind can be self-aware. According to the cogito it is effectively the ONLY thing that can be truly "known" as opposed to the "cosmic demon" in the conjecture creating a fake reality for us. Everything can be false and a simulation or fake but the mind can be self-aware so we know that our existence itself is not an illusion.

At least as I understand it. While that is a form of knowledge it doesn't really explain how one knows things other than the fact of one's own existence.
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Agree.
 
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