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This Monkey is Better at Philosophy than New Atheists

Reborn Relic

Damn American Cowboy
Joined
Dec 31, 2015
Messages
555
MBTI Type
INTP
You are presuming too much about time, it is not observable unless you make it conceptually suited to observation, which is why Scientism is fundamentally— philosophically flawed. Time is not a fungible ['physical'] property or feature (and the contrary is empirically impossible to falsify,

I mean, how would you define time then? I'd define it as a general sequencing of events, such that I will only feel, say, a need to go to the bathroom only alongside memories or other empirical cues that I've eaten, or the effects of pregnancy only alongside memories or other empirical cues that I've had sex and some other events occurred. Of course, not all things that you experience will have memories associated with them, but to most standards of proof held by empiricists and scientists, there are ways around that--asking someone else to document, or using recordings, and so on. A disproof of time would require a vast number of people to experience something different than the types of phenomena I've described above on a constant basis. But, it is empirically or scientifically falsifiable.

It's not necessarily falsifiable if you don't start off buying into the validity of observations and so on, but I didn't really interpret that as an argument the comic was getting into at the time. If I was misinterpreting, I apologize.


and so Science or Empiricism is fundamentally incapable of resolution [that can amount to anything other than the reading of an indeterminacy that amounts to statistical non-sense: oh wait, the new-atheists actually believe that such 'statistical models' contain something other than a figment of philosophical ineptitude...

Science as a case for Empiricism is incredibly weak, Empiricism itself is incredibly weak unless your willing to retract its domain to quite scant relativistic and contingent measurements. The people who philosophically laid down Science knew better, which is why they spoke of "regularities", and NOT 'laws'. The same is why they spoke of MAGNITUDES, and not 'quantities' (they weren't presumptuous philosophical piss-ants like the new-atheists we see today). Only the deists among them ventured the "law" connotation; for an Atheist to adopt this language is an hypocrisy required to cover over the gaping conceptual lacuna that is the confused state of material-monism as the case for our reality, which manifests as the impossible hope that Science can render a final answer instead of just pretend to be on the search for one..

No game can produce an answer that doesn't uncover more about the Game's own nature than the actual field of its play- Science is not an exception; the universe is not such an outsmarted and dormant THING to be outshone by the superior avatar of worship through the mighty group-thinkers in New-Atheism... Thanks for literally taking us back to the warring Gods of the Sumerian city states. Set or Tiamat will devour you now.

I mean, yes, I do admit that science and the observations of science can't ever really escape the trap of the mechanisms that are needed to make observations, but, as you hint at already, that's true for every method of seeing things..

The question, then, is merely one of what happens when these systems conflict? Would you rather intuitively know that there is water in this section of desert you're in, while feeling thirst and creeping death, or would you rather feel your thirst being quenched, continue experiencing life after that, but be unable to shake this nagging feeling that you didn't drink water at that moment and are dead?


[MENTION=26953]The Mask[/MENTION] , A lot of what I wrote wasn't specifically directed at you, although I do think my writing comprehensively covers the fuller intellectual-sentiment represented by your post, furthermore, I would like to specifically point out that:



^ I believe that statement is essentially tautological, isn't it?

For the most part, but people can try to disprove a system using the system--try to prove it's inconsistent with itself.


Dunning-Kruger is a bitch.


Nah, I know I'm out of my depth.
 
Joined
Mar 2, 2016
Messages
625
Deutsch would respond by saying that empiricism is merely a way of negating models not confirming them absolutely. We tend to trust models that have been verified as opposed to some random new (or old) model because it has predictive power, but if that changes that merely invalidates the model itself not empiricism.
 

Zangetshumody

Member
Joined
Nov 19, 2009
Messages
458
MBTI Type
INTJ
I mean, how would you define time then? I'd define it as a general sequencing of events, such that I will only feel, say, a need to go to the bathroom only alongside memories or other empirical cues that I've eaten, or the effects of pregnancy only alongside memories or other empirical cues that I've had sex and some other events occurred. Of course, not all things that you experience will have memories associated with them, but to most standards of proof held by empiricists and scientists, there are ways around that--asking someone else to document, or using recordings, and so on. A disproof of time would require a vast number of people to experience something different than the types of phenomena I've described above on a constant basis. But, it is empirically or scientifically falsifiable.

I'm just going to deal with your first paragraph, because I believe it contains an incorrect point of departure, and I didn't follow the subsequent reasoning in the later paragraphs.



The cause of our contention, and the issue I take against your position can be easily summarized by examining the substance of your very first question: "how would you define time then?"

This question already presumes that reality operates in the way Scientism requires it to (from externally objective and pervasive 'laws');- this kind of inherent reliance on material-atomism depends on a kind of misapplied transitivity, that is both unwarranted and alien to sound reasoning. The reason that such thinking must be naturally regarded as unsound, is because any reliance on defined features cannot be presumed to have a universal property, and has already been insurmountably debunked, in the now famous caveat- 'correlation is not causation'. "Time" in itself can have some kind of 'ideal' identity, which can be considered together with other similarly construed 'ideal forms';- all of which avails nothing of use to empirical thinking, unless you are considering a particular preposition that contains some instantiated treatment of time. Prepositions are the first expressions of phenomena which can- contract with, or attach to knowledge claims, treating 'time itself' as a generalized effect from some forever disguised and essentially stochastic prima-materia— is a trick Scientism has been deluding itself with in order to distinguish a knowable-determinism from out of an imagined [and mystically inexhaustible] static-'state of affairs'- as only such a thing could have rendered itself suitable for being measured. This setup is somewhat analogous with the kind of tautology that I identified you as already making.

The 'intellectual crime' of tautology is not a question of consistency, its a question of sufficient reasoning: you can manufacture a tautology about something which can also be separately explained and thereby convincingly contended;- its just that the tautology offers no merit of conforming to any such sound reasoning [to mark it as convincing]. Separate premises cannot be tautological, or they must be regarded together as a solitary premise: and when this happens in philosophy it causes a cascading ideological slant which is so pernicious, that it subsequently cannot be diffused, marching onward after its own corrupted auspices:- and often people are too philosophically inept to discern the hearts of these ideological beasts. The modern incarnations of political fascism is currently furthering itself in a similar style of operation. e.g ~If it smells like a different tautological premise, its not the brand of 'group-think-kin' I want to promote as the holder of a supreme moral/narrative-authority. In my view, all these kinds of incarnations are mentally-constructed 'nations', and while such mental-frameworks might each contain their limited uses, as might any implement or tool: they just aren't worth ceding any epistemology or ontological authority to (as they aren't even the engine for any created [or generated] progress; even Aristotle with his Scientific inclination, conceded foremost to the Man, and then only subsequent and afterwards to 'his hand', for being the preeminent agency to all the movement in the system).
 

Zangetshumody

Member
Joined
Nov 19, 2009
Messages
458
MBTI Type
INTJ
I mean, how would you define time then? I'd define it as a general sequencing of events, such that I will only feel, say, a need to go to the bathroom only alongside memories or other empirical cues that I've eaten, or the effects of pregnancy only alongside memories or other empirical cues that I've had sex and some other events occurred. Of course, not all things that you experience will have memories associated with them, but to most standards of proof held by empiricists and scientists, there are ways around that--asking someone else to document, or using recordings, and so on. A disproof of time would require a vast number of people to experience something different than the types of phenomena I've described above on a constant basis. But, it is empirically or scientifically falsifiable.

It's not necessarily falsifiable if you don't start off buying into the validity of observations and so on, but I didn't really interpret that as an argument the comic was getting into at the time. If I was misinterpreting, I apologize.

I am not the maker of the original cartoon, and I am only defending my own opinion on the matter.

I want to a make a separate response to your writing on the point of falsification, which will also deal more intimately with your internal reasoning, as my first response did not interface with your ideas so directly (I was dealing with the issue on a much more top-down and conceptual basis in my initial response above this one).

The point I was drawing about falsification, is that any correlation made with an empirical framework will be regarded as germane with empiricism, it falls into the same critique levied against psycho-analysis:- any result can be redrawn to conform with a posited inconsistency, through the use of reinterpretation and extension made to the analysis. In this sense, empiricism has already proven itself absurd (assuming to take Science as the valid representative for Empiricism), because Science has fundamentally uncovered within itself, and has already been inextricably saddled to an indeterminate causal-nexus (which is fully depicted as statistical non-sense with an inherently nebulous interpretation— or the abandonment of an empirical correlation to observed phenomena {which is how you would expect a force emanating from 'anti-realism' to scientifically be represented to Science;- but still Scientism prefers to wallow in denial}, and this manifests in other areas of Science, as things like, the mystery of some particular aspect to the 'big bang', or the incomprehensible string-theory symmetries, which we are supposed to be super-impressed by [similar to the imposition of awe inspired by the great and elaborate construction of Gothic Cathedrals I should add]). Empiricism and indeterminacy are pretty much insoluble when you realize how either of their philosophical constituents intersect: and I believe this proves the tautological aspect that Scientism has for too long been masquerading as a cogent and authoritative 'world view', touted as then being a possible source of merited epistemology (which I say it can never deliver— what so many new-atheists keep pretending Science has already delivered, but which Science can only ever promise to still be arriving at— there can be no more blatant and obvious mark of #lolBANDWAGON group-think!).

Sorry I guess I've just focused on all the very conceptual stuff again... I would like to point out that the specific evidence you give of time, is not so much a metric for conceptualizing time as an objective [and externally independent] plane, so much as there being some repository for the accounting of a (named) "fact" which also lends itself to being communicated as (messaged) "information". Therefore your description of how you conceive time is not offensive to me, but it also has absolutely no treatment of 'future time' (which is also why it's not offensive to my understanding of 'reality');- and if you extend the connotation of some of your phrases to include the implication of future time, my endorsement gets retracted. It goes without saying, Science: if it is taken as being a functional Empiricism (by the way, I believe you can save Empiricism by applying it to 'psychological reality'), requires the manufacture of a knowledge ,which can supposedly 'predict the future';- or claims to know things that must govern what the future does: which if you remember, is even clearly debunked within Science's own discoveries- because it defines the basic nature of the universe as indeterminate, and things really might just 'spontaneously levitate' but only don't— by reason of a consistent 'statistically insurmountable improbability'— you can't be a thinking person to plant your world view upon that kind of nebulously confounding and feeble non-sense... at least on that one: I can literally sit together with Einstein in my corner.

^The reason I'm so repulsed, is that new-Atheists have just moved the external God Figure into the 'all encompassing and pervasive force of' STATISTICS. That's actually a really good discovery which I'm now just remembering that Jung already came up with: Statics is the God of Science- perhaps a more permissive and slightly more Benign deity owing to its apathetic treatment of its human vassals- at least less metaphysically harsh than the Nors religion... but it does cogently explain the kinds of perverse ideological misanthropy that blights our current cultural ethos (which can only only hope to excuse by advancing their faith as a the most accessible universal vessel for disparate historical populations to converge on (to which I'd say: rather leave that to the real peacemakers)).

I think its safe to conclude now, that the light which the Brights had only promised us, is much too much of an absurd-elitism to purchase the energies of all the Scientific underachievers among humanity, which I imagine they might have thought to dispense with at some point after realizing that we weren't all going to jointly commit to their essential cult-reverence for the worship of statistical-prevailing trends (or 'might makes right' for the mathematically inclined).

[MENTION=26953]The Mask[/MENTION] , sorry for hijacking my responses to you with all this ideological grand-standing, but at this point I feel compelled to crystallize the broadest edifice of the arguments, which I had already started to lay out in my responses to you.
 
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