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Originally written by ef:

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until the next time I see Thuryl turn a philosophical discussion into a game where he molests the other participants with knives.

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Has he been knifing others?
I feel much drawn to the point he's arguing from. Thuryl is asking into the nature of 'reality', and that's an intriguing question, or isn't it?

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What I didn't quite get was the whole 'A and not A' section, when it was used to prove or disprove the existence of God/Gods.

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Every artist would feel a painting he's done to be part of him, an expression of him. Insofar the painting would be him, and also, as he's certainly more than the picture, not him at the same time. Does not the same apply to God/Gods and his/their creation?

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Originally written by Kelandon:

SkeleTony, not all brain activity is consciousness, unless you have a really odd definition of consciousness.

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Some brain activity is involved in sight, or smells, or movement of the limbs, or whatever. In fact, I am pretty sure that we don't know which activities within the brain create consciousness.

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That is, we can't point to a particular section and say, "That's the consciousness center of the brain." Therefore it is not particularly useful to define consciousness in terms of its physical manifestations in the brain.

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Certainly there is reason to think that consciousness is a manifestation of activity in the brain, but that's going backwards: we're observing a phenomenon and then finding the cause. Defining the phenomenon in terms of the cause is a bit odd. That would be like defining gravity as a property of mass, rather than saying that gravity is the principle that all objects with mass attract each other.

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The alternative, of course, is to define consciousness in the normal way, with words like "awareness" and "reasoning ability" and that sort of thing.

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EDIT: SkeleTony, I wasn't going to bring this up, but you keep dropping my name as if I were an example of something. I note that you ignored my last post on the "god" issue. Our discussion was not yet finished. I am not an example of anything yet.

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Originally written by Andrew Miller:

I guess that line of argument just doesn't follow in my mind. "Round squares" have no meaning because these terms (of our own construction) are absolute, and so are mutually exclusive. Can the same logic be applied to an omnipotent deity and the "unliftable rock" issue? "Unliftable" is a relative description; not absolute, like a shape. Is this description meaningful when applied to infinity?

EDIT: For that matter, is the concept of infinity logically consistent?

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Originally written by Andrew Miller:

You can walk on your hands, too. ;) Give AI another few years to develop, and maybe we'll have a self-aware machine - I would say that it's entirely possible and probable.

EDIT: SkeleTony, am I correct in stating that your old stance (of a month ago or so) was "if there is a god, then it doesn't appear to interact with the world/universe and is not worth venerating?" If this was your view, what then is the purpose of taking the harder line of "there is no god?"

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Originally written by Kelandon:

The only way you could get the second sentence to follow from the first would be to phrase it like this: consciousness = thoughts = brain activity. Thus, things without brains have no consciousness.

Or, in formal logical terms: 1) All consciousness is brain activity. 2) If an entity does not have a brain, then it cannot have brain activity. 3) Therefore, entities that do not have brains cannot have consciousness. This argument is valid in general: all A is B. If not C, then not B. Therefore, all not C is not A.

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I would take issue with 1 (all consciousness is brain activity), since 2 is pretty reasonable and 3 follows from 1 and 2. 1 is an empirical observation and inherently a generalization, not a deductive fact, unless you reverse-define consciousness as being only brain activity, which I think is weird. After all, the idea of consciousness existed before anyone knew that it was linked to brain activity.

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EDIT: I think what Thuryl was pointing out is that your statement looked too much like the logical operation, "All consciousness is thought OR brain activity" (which would not lead to the second statement), not "All consciousness is thought AND all thought is brain activity" (which would).

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EDIT 2: SkeleTony, you made a procedure for the scientific method with ordered steps (many posts back). Observation was the first one. Thuryl has just pointed out that observation is not necessarily the first step. Your list was, to that extent, wrong.

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Originally written by Thuryl:

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Matter you are unware of exists(the tree in my yard, the house I live in etc.) even though you are unaware of it. Correct?

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Presumably, it exists to you. Your house existed to me (if in a somewhat vague form) since I can reasonably assume that you had somewhere to live. The tree in your yard didn't exist for me until you told me about it, because I had no concept of it. Since it's plausible for someone to have a tree in their yard and you have no reason to lie, I can conclude that said tree probably exists. You, being able to directly observe the tree, can presumably conclude that it almost certainly exists (unless there's no tree there and you just picked "the tree in my yard" as an arbitrary example).

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"Objective existence" is the problem here. Different people have different things which definitely exist for them, which may or may not exist for them, and which definitely do not exist for them, depending on the degree to which those things could in principle have consequences for them.

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Even if something could in principle be said to objectively exist as long as anyone observed it, in practice none of us has the objective viewpoint required to say that.

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We both AGREEE that there can be no "meaning" understood(for ANY words) without things capable of such(abstract thinkers/minds) which is a seperate issue from whether matter exists.

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I don't think it is a separate issue. A statement that isn't meaningful can't be true.

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I regard the ability for someone to form a concept of something's existence as being essential for its existence.

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I already explained that. It does exist in the past now, but it didn't exist in the present then.

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I am not asking whether WE could have SAID "The planet exists".

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Maybe you should be asking that.

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I've answered it twice now. The fact that you don't like or can't understand my answer isn't my problem.

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Matter is pre-existing, but our observation is what allows matter to pre-exist. It doesn't "pop into existence"; it exists in the past, but it exists in the past only because we observe it in the present and conclude that it must have existed in the past as well.

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And I answered by distinguishing two different kinds of past tense; the one obtained by conceptually reversing time for the event alone and the one obtained by conceptually reversing time for both the event and the observer. In the latter case, the observer thinks himself right out of the picture, so in order to make meaningful statements about the past we are dependent on things as they appear to us in the present.

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If a statement isn't meaningful, it can't be true. How hard is it for you to get this?

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I wasn't dodging the point, I was making a different point. I didn't know that was against the law. Actually, I'd be quite interested to hear why you're continuing this discussion; you don't seem to be enjoying it very much.

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Saying that matter exists in the past as a result of our observing it in the present is entirely different from saying that it comes into existence at the point in time at which we observe it.

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We still use some method to choose those assumptions, even if it's not the same method that we use to follow lines of reasoning based on those assumptions. Why should that method be immune to criticism?

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Holding our most basic beliefs to a standard of proof less stringent than we apply to those that follow from them seems somewhat odd, to say the least.

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Perhaps I was too subtle in making my point. I was objecting specifically to including observation as an initial, independent item in the scientific method, not to including observation in the scientific method in general.

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It isn't possible to make observations about a hypothesis until one already has a hypothesis to make observations about; raw observations without a conceptual framework to fit them in are of little scientific value.

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The scientific method gives us a means to distinguish jackalopes from jackrabbits and genies from genes.

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So let me see if I understand you. The scientific method is intended to be a procedure for obtaining true propositions?

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Your "means to distinguish" comment also seems to imply that the scientific method can be applied as a decision procedure for the truth of any proposition for which truth or falsity can be decided.

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Is that a fair summary of your position?

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A little experiement: Define "bad" for me right here(a much simpler word than "thought" no?). After you do so, I will come by and show you how incomplete your definition is since it will not include all possible definitions applicable to every possible speaker, audience, context and usage.

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Okay. Now I'm no lexicographer, and ideally I'd like a few weeks to consult with people who are before attempting a definition, but here's my little attempt anyway.

Being "bad" is not a property of an object as such; something is "bad" for or to something. Something which is bad for a conscious being has properties which are, overall, contrary to the fulfilment of that being's desires. An individual property of an object may be bad for a being in isolation even if the object as a whole is not bad for that being (for example, a medicine's taste may be bad for a particular being, in that that beings desires to avoid experiencing such a taste, but the overall effect of exposure to the medicine may not be bad due to its overriding health benefits).

We can also say that something is "bad" for an inanimate object. When something is bad for an object, it is generally bad with respect to a conscious being's attitude toward that object. Something which is bad for an object with respect to a conscious being confers on that object properties which are undesirable to that being, or removes from it properties which are desirable to that being. For example, filling the fuel tank with sugar is bad for my car with respect to me, because it removes from it the property of being usable for transportation, which is a property that I desire of my car.

When we say that something is bad for an object without specifying who it is bad for that object for, we are usually implying that the object has a generally-accepted intended purpose and that the bad thing acts to prevent the fulfilment of that purpose (again, in this sense it can be said that filling the fuel tank with sugar is bad for a car, because it is generally accepted among car users that a car has an intended purpose of being used for transportation).

When we simply say that something is "bad", we usually mean that we are assessing it as being bad for ourselves, or in some cases for the audience we are addressing.

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Your simple definition is incomplete.

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Your consciousness wouldn't be so important to you if it were just a brain activity the same as anyone else's; your consciousness is associated with you as a conscious person, while other people's consciousness is not associated with you.

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When people talk about consciousness, they generally mean the subjective aspects of it, not the externally-observable manifestations such as brain activity.

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Consciousness = thought/brain activity. Things without brains have no consciousness.

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The first sentence does not follow from the second.

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Originally written by m's provocation:

How could you know that it is indectable? Are there ever any changes to your garage? Of course the leaf that got blown into the garage wasn't carried by this dragon, but it could never be proved that this dragon didn't carry it in. Ok I see your point. Why believe in the dragon if any possible effects can be explained in a much better way. I suppose that is why the question of miracles comes up. ie things that can not be explained naturally, or at least not by presently "detectable" natural causes. Things like this lead you to look for other causes that have not yet been detected.

Meh I never should have tried arguing with *i.

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Originally written by Thuryl:

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The point is that matter exists REGARDLESS of whether we are around to assign subjective meanings to it's existence or create means of communicating ideas to one another about the whole thing.

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See, this is the sentence that just doesn't mean anything to me. What does it mean to say that something exists regardless of whether we are around?

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See this is the point I don't think we can possibly resolve or come to agreement on since this sounds like complete nonsense to ME(unless you are being evasively ambiguous in how you define "fact"). Did matter exist before minds/observers or not? If you conclude that it DID then you are agreeing with me and quibbling over what YOU mean by "fact" and what I mean by the same word is a pointless endeavor.

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Matter did exist before minds, but couldn't have existed in the absence of minds.

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Part of the problem here is that my argument relies on the fact that in my view, existence requires a non-causal, retrospective assignation of existence by a conscious being, which I don't think your philosophy has any concept analogous to.

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To give you an idea of where I'm coming from, to me, the statement "The planet Earth existed 1 billion years ago" is true now, but the statement "The planet Earth exists now" was NOT true 1 billion years ago.

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I am using "fact"(for lack of a better word) in the sense of something being literally true, regardless of subjective evaluatiuons and assigned meanings. I am NOT arguing about whether the word "fact" can have any meaning without abstract-thinking observers. Two different issues.

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I don't see them as different issues. It can't be true to say that facts exist unless someone holds a definition of what a fact is.

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Exist v. 1)To have actual being: Be real.

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Defining something with near-synonyms isn't very helpful.

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I define existence as above and having an appreciable(physical) effect on other existent things, regardless of whether anyone is around to apprecite it or to even use words like "exists".

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See, I don't think a physical effect alone is an appreciable effect. Nothing is appreciable without an appreciator.

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Don't we all think everyone should hold the same things important as we do? Look at the arguments people start over things as minor as not liking the same music. I'm not trying or expecting to convince you of anything anyway (and I hope you're not either); I'm just arguing for fun and for practice.

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The moon will go on being, even after we are extinct.

I find THAT important.

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Why?

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Why is something important to you when you won't be around to see it?

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People do make assumptions in order to get things done, but for most people this is done very much as an ad hoc process. Most people (perhaps even all people) end up holding a very large set of assumptions that contains some inconsistencies and would fall apart if they spent too much time analysing it.

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That's not my argument. In fact, I was arguing the opposite; that whatever initially inspires someone to pursue a line of scientific thought, that inspiration should be considered to be outside the scientific method -- and therefore that "Observation" did not belong at the start of that list, because it is not a discrete step in the scientific method.

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[b]

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Are you pursuing a career in science or are you seeking to attack science to legitimise something else like parapsychology or therapeutic touch or somesuch? I only ask because I have not met any scientists who argue AGAINST scientific method!?

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I assure you I have every intention of pursuing a career in mainstream science.

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But just for ****s and grins, i will play your baby game and give you an off the cuff and oversimplified description of the scientific method just to see what you do with it:

1)Observation.
2)Hypothesis.
3)testing.
4)Falsification.
5)Theory(include predictive aspects and decriptive mechanisms).
6)More testing & falsififcation attempts.
7)Peer review.
8)Revisiting/re-examining the phenomenom for which the theory is proposed to explain as well as the theory itself.
9)Revision according to new data.

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Before I tackle this, I'm going to ask one simple question:

What do you believe is the purpose of having a scientific method?

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There was some point when YOUR definition did not include such. My point is that you said, and I do believe these were your exact words, "thought is defined as brain activity", and that this is an incomplete definition precisely BECAUSE it does not mention consciousness.

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I hope you're getting the point by now that your little "thought is defined as brain activity" throwaway line, as if all we needed to know about thought was that it was an activity of the brain, kinda got under my skin.

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[b]Not when you said "thought is defined as brain activity", you didn't.

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Originally written by Thuryl:

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Originally written by SkeleTony:

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Originally written by Kelandon:

SkeleTony, that was the biggest cop-out I have ever seen. You can't handle the general case. Why don't you just admit that the concept of god is not inherently self-contradictory?

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I will take this as a concession then. If you cannot answer my points/arguments then be a bigger man/woman(I do not know your gender) and say so but to withdraw shouting "cop out" and the like is chiken-s#!t.

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He made a perfectly reasonable point, which is that you failed to prove the general case. Either you have to individually disprove the possibility of the existence of every deity in the Hindu, Greek, Sumerian, Norse, etc. pantheons, or you have to provide some general disproof of the possibility of a concept which encompasses every god in every one of those pantheons.

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Originally written by Thuryl:

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The legs would exist whether they were walking or not. The walking would not exist without the legs.

One has a dependent existence and one has an independent existence.

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Why is this distinction so important to you?

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The legs themselves wouldn't exist if the person with them had never been born, so in a sense the legs' existence are also dependent on something. The only difference is that the thing they depend on is a prior event rather than a currently-existing object.

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If something is important, it's worth including in a philosophy. Your philosophy seems to exclude the subjective aspect of consciousness.

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I agree that my own existence is not specifically necessary for things to have any meaning. However, if there were no conscious beings whatsoever, then nothing would have any meaning to anybody -- since a proposition can't have a truth value unless it's meaningful, this means that without conscious beings, there are no facts. (In fact, without conscious beings there isn't even the fact that there are no facts, because that would require assigning a truth value to the proposition "There are no facts", which can't be done in the absence of conscious beings.)

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There was a time in the early goings of our universe when no consciousness existed(brained creatures had not evolved yet) and still matter existed. Was this not important? Was it not a fact because you were not around to observe it?

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It is a fact, but only because we are observing it now. If we never came into existence so as to observe it, it would not be a fact. By existing, we have retrospectively assigned existence to everything that existed before us. Unless someone at some point forms the concept of existence, nothing can exist.

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See, I'm not arguing that the rock doesn't exist in the absence of observation either. I'm saying that in the absence of observers, there's no way to assign any truth value at all to the rock's existence.

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And again I ask you, what is the point of this? I have never argued any aspect of "truth value" or whether such can be had without evaluators/observers.

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If the proposition "X exists" has no truth value, you can't correctly say that X exists.

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I don't even regard the above statement as being meaningful. To say "X exists even though X's existence does not, never has had, and never will have any consequences for conscious beings" seems like a contradiction to me.

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It has everything to do with my positions. Essentially, I define "existing" as "being observable or having observable consequences", because it's the only definition I've ever seen that doesn't involve ontological handwaving. How do you define it?

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Part of the problem seems to be that I simply don't accept that there's an important distinction between your ideas of dependent and independent existence.

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But only because we eventually existed. If we never came to exist, we couldn't assign existence to anything else.

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The very concept of an axiom is only meaningful in a formal system. If people really held axioms in their minds as a whole, they'd never be able to change them -- people can and do change the axiomatic systems they use for reasoning, which shows that the axioms of their reasoning weren't the axioms of their minds. I'd argue that the mind as a whole can't have axioms, because minds aren't formal systems.

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So would you regard a discovery found through a hypothesis based on a lucky guess but proven by going through the rest of the scientific method as being a scientific discovery?

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You asked two seperate questions there.

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If you regard the scientific method as a single, unified conceptual object, they're one question, because if one fails to follow one part of a method one has failed to follow the method as a whole. If you don't regard the scientific method as a single concept, you shouldn't call it a method.

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Do you actually hold a unified concept of a "scientific discovery" at all?

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It seems that you don't. I simply assumed that the "scientific method" you described was a system for evaluating where a discovery was scientifically sound, and that it would be declared so if and only if the discovery occurred through the application of the scientific method as a whole -- otherwise, it's not a method but merely a set of unrelated actions, and then there's no way to evaluate whether a discovery is scientifically sound and can be relied on for future work.

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It's becoming increasingly clear that I somehow misinterpreted the purpose of your laundry list. I assumed that, in your view, one could simply assess whether a discovery was scientific by checking:

*Was the line of research based initially on an observation?
*Was a hypothesis formed?
*etc.

Apparently you're not arguing that this is the case, in which case I question the utility of your scientific method for anything at all.

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I probably did not include a few things. I believe I DID include an "etc." did I not? In any case you keep harping on my "laundry list" as if it were meant to be the be all and end all conclusive definition of scietific methodlogy or something.

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It certainly isn't a conclusive or adequate definition of scientific methodology, and that's what I've been trying to show.

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You argued that the scientific method is something that's clearly defined and widely known, and you argued as if you yourself held a clear definition of what it was. It seems as if at least the latter is not the case.

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[b]

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Walk v. (1)To move or cause to move on foot at a pace slower than a run.

Think v. (1)To have or formulate in the mind.(2A) To Ponder. (2B) To Reason.

Mind n. (1)The human consciousness that originates in the brain and is manifested esp. in thought, perception, emotion, will, memory, and imagination.

Any questions? Good.

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You'll notice that the definition of "thought" there effectively includes the concept of consciousness as well as the brain. Now we're getting somewhere.

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[qb]It's my opinion that the scope of human knowledge is profoundly incomplete without a philosophy of thought that extends considerably further than dictionary definitions.[/b]

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So we need a different psychological tool for each job (science for assessing truth values, something else for describing subjective experiences)?

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That's unappealing to me.

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My goal has always been to hold a unified philosophy that's useful for any purpose I might want to turn it to.

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How can your definition of thinking tell us all that's worth knowing about thinking when it doesn't even include the ability (which is surely an aspect of thinking) to assess things as being worth knowing?

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Originally written by Kelandon:

SkeleTony, that was the biggest cop-out I have ever seen. You can't handle the general case. Why don't you just admit that the concept of god is not inherently self-contradictory?

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Originally written by Thuryl:

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No...you don't seem to understand what I am saying. YOUR usage of "exists"(in regards to "consciousness existing") is to MY usage of "exists"(as in "matter exists") as the word "rose"(a type of budding flower) is to "rose"(as in "He rose up to see what time it was".
Some people "believe" in Jesus. They believe he literally exists/existed and is the son of God.

Instances of consciousness do not exist anymore than instances of walking exist.

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Okay, it seems we disagree about the meaning of "exist". An instance of walking is an observable phenomenon just the same as the legs doing the walking are; I don't see where one draws the distinction and says that one exists while the other doesn't.

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The mechanisms involved have no value on their own, because value itself requires consciousness to define it.

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Without consciousness, nothing has value. Therefore consciousness is, to me, of supreme importance.

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Conscious isn't important to you?

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I'm sure you'd object rather strongly to being rendered permanently unconscious.

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If a fact doesn't have any meaning, I'm not sure how you can call it a fact.

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See, I'm not arguing that the rock doesn't exist in the absence of observation either. I'm saying that in the absence of observers, there's no way to assign any truth value at all to the rock's existence.

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I'm not saying that the rock disappears the minute one turns one's back, but that it or some consequence of its existence has to be observed at some point before it can meaningfully be said to exist.

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[b]Therefore, a world with matter and no observers is identical to a world with no matter and no observers -- and therefore matter is dependent for its existence on conscious observation.

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I'm not saying things cease to exist as soon as you cease to observe them. I am saying that if something is never observed in the first place there's no meaningful difference between it existing and not existing.

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I have to acknowledge there's always the possibility that the axioms I use for reasoning will turn out to be inconsistent, in which case they can prove literally anything. This is a general problem with formal systems and not specific to any particular system of axioms.

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In any case, isn't this an ad numeri?

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You argued that axioms were necessary in order to get things done. If people can get things done without axioms, your argument falls apart.

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So would you regard a discovery found through a hypothesis based on a lucky guess but proven by going through the rest of the scientific method as being a scientific discovery?

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If so, then "Observation" should be struck off the start of the list as being unnecessary as an initial step. (What DOES constitute a scientific initial observation, anyway? An initial observation by its very nature is serendipitous and unlooked-for.)

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You didn't include "Peer Review" in your initial laundry list of requirements for the scientific method.

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It matters that I'm able to use either, because it means that "legged activity" is an inadequate definition of "walking", and I'm arguing that "brain activity" is likewise an inadequate definition of thinking.

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That's all very well as far as it goes, but the fact that thinking is done by brains doesn't tell us everything worth knowing about thinking, which is why I regard your definition of "thinking" as incomplete.

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Originally written by KernelKnowledge12:

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Originally written by SkeleTony:

I take NOTHING on "faith". Never touch the stuff. You seem to be under the impression that we have some choice in the mnatter as far as these first principles are concerned? The reason these assumptions are "necessary" is because we are FORCED to accept them as a starting point because reasoning cannot be subject to infinite regress of justification by reasoning.

Without these axioms, we are just chattering imbecilles sitting around waiting for a death we have no reason to think will come(and then it DOES!).

"Faith" is the adherance to a belief/claim in lieu of(or in SPITE of) evidence.

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"FAITH" is to trust a belief/claim in the absence of corrobarating evidence.

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By not logically proving the existence of matter, you take it on FAITH, or assume, that it exists.

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Originally written by m's provocation:

Brief Question- Sorry to break in.

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"God" cannot exist for the same reason that round squares cannot exist. SOmething cannot be both 'A' and 'Not A' at once.

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How do you see God as a contradiction? You use the example round square but round is defined as "not strait" to be loose, and square is the opposite. Is God defined to you as the existant non-existant?

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Originally written by Thuryl:

[quote] [quote]You're not really arguing that when we speak of consciousness existing, we're only speaking metaphorically, are you?

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I mean that your consciousness is qualitatively different to you than the consciousness of other people is to you, because your consciousness is the only consciousness that's accessible to you. That qualitative difference -- the experience of having access to consciousness -- is something that's difficult to describe (and probably impossible to describe in completely objective terms), but I certainly hope that, being conscious yourself, you know what I mean by it.

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A functional definition of consciousness, that can point out consciousness from the outside without having access to it, seems to me to be missing the most important thing about consciousness, which is that we're conscious of having it.

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I never said thought caused the existence of matter. I don't see the relation between mind and matter as a causal one. I'd argue that mind and matter are interdependent; neither could meaningfully be said to exist without the other, because mind relies on matter for its perpetuation and matter relies on mind for the definition of its existence. A universe with matter and no conscious observers would not by definition be observably different from a universe with no matter and no conscious observers, because observable differences require observers.

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And if two things are not observably different, it's only reasonable to say that for all practical purposes they're identical.

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Therefore, a world with matter and no observers is identical to a world with no matter and no observers -- and therefore matter is dependent for its existence on conscious observation.

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Well, idealism has connotations of monism; I'd probably be better categorised as a dualist.

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So, in other words you assume anything is possible.

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No. That would be like saying that set theory assumes the existence of arithmetic, or that materialism assumes the existence of Mount Everest. Holding assumptions which imply X is not the same as assuming X.

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Well, as long as you're not equating "I'm certain" with "I'm right". I don't know how you can retain an objective notion of truth when the criteria by which you judge truth are subjective, though.

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Are you sure that it's necessary to hold anything as being beyond doubt?

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I'd argue that the majority of people don't really hold any specific axioms at all -- they just don't think enough about their beliefs to give themselves reason to doubt them. Instead they just wing it and accumulate opinions as they go along without much regard to their consistency.

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I was not attempting to argue that observations weren't necessary at all; merely that it wasn't necessary to make observations before forming a hypothesis. Plenty of hypotheses which turned out to be true were initially formed based on philosophy, ideology or blind hope, and only later supported by evidence.

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You have something of a point here; it'd be very difficult to present a scientific case heavily weighted in the favour of a specific deity. I do think that by applying a somewhat biased outlook to the evidence, it's possible to find support for a generalised intelligent-design theory (although I suppose even if there were overwhelming support for ID, you'd look for extraterrestrials before gods).

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That sounds like a rather silly argument to me. "Kicking" is also something legged things do, but it's obviously not the same action as "walking". Are you really arguing that the action of thinking has no definable properties other than being a function of the brain?

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Originally written by Kelandon:

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Originally written by SkeleTony:
I was only saying it was certain to ME that God did not exist. YOU took it upon yourself to challenge MY certainty.

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Originally written by SkeleTony:
Secondly, we most certainly CAN say that some things do NOT exist adn are quite impossible. It was this realization that drove me from weak atheism(re: lacking a god-belief) to strong atheism(re: Supernatural Gods cannot exist). I can say this because of a little thing called the law of non-contradiction. "God" cannot exist for the same reason that round squares cannot exist. SOmething cannot be both 'A' and 'Not A' at once.

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In context, this seemed to suggest that objectively gods do not and cannot exist. Are you now are only saying that according to your set of assumptions, gods do not and cannot exist?

In other words, to make the distinction that Thuryl does below, are you merely saying "I'm certain," rather than "I'm right"?

If so, I do not disagree. However, I do think it is important to note that your set of assumptions are not the only ones that could reasonably be made.

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Originally written by Kelandon:

So you're saying that you take them on faith?

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[b]If your assumptions are not subject to proof (or verification on the basis of evidence), what makes them any better than anyone else's?

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[qb]You're pretty close to contradicting yourself here. Are your assumptions subject to verification through evidence in the universe or not?[/b]

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I do not use materialism, idealism, logic or critical thinking to prove or disprove materialism or idealism.

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Proof by contradiction is a relatively accepted technique. You take a certain set of assumptions and use those assumptions to show their inherent inconsistency. Why dismiss it here?

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Originally written by Le Diable d'Ouangs:

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Btw, I do not argue that conciousness is "more certain" or "NOT more certain" to exist. I argue that it deos NOT exist AT ALL in the way that matter exists. Two completely different useages of the word "exists".

"I am going to make a killing scalping Super Bowl tickets!"

"I am killing people for their Super Bowl Tickets."

Which is the above is the more prolific murderer? The answer is the second one because the first one has not murdered anyone.
That is what it is like to try and argue that we are more certain of conciousness' existence than matter's.

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You're not really arguing that when we speak of consciousness existing, we're only speaking metaphorically, are you?

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Or are you arguing that consciousness exists in the same way that, say, the Internet exists? Neither is an object you can point to; consciousness is a series of processes occurring in brains, the Internet is a series of processes occurring in computers and associated infrastructure. All the same, one can provide evidence for the existence of both of them.

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(I'm assuming for the sake of argument that you hold some kind of functional definition of consciousness, even though it seems to me that such a definition can only be held if one deliberately misses the point of what we mean when we say we're conscious of something.)

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So you're saying that the fact that you believe in matter has nothing to do with the fact that you believe you observe matter in the world around you?

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Therefore, matter exists and this is a certainty. End of debate on that one. For me to challenge YOUR idealism, I would have to grant your premises/axioms and find a way, within that idealism paradigm, to show it to be somehow incorrect which is impossible to do.

Therefore I do not go around mixing it up with idealists and solipsists.

Same goes for YOU on the subject of materialism. Matter exists and is the primary stuff of the universe. Conciousness, walking, jumping, flying etc. are activities & functions emergent from matter and material processes. That is my, beyond question, necessary assumption. Yours is different. Neither of us are going to "prove" or "disprove" the other's first principles.

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If this is your view, you shouldn't go around saying that it's certain that God doesn't exist. At best, you might be able to prove that it's certain to materialists that God doesn't exist.

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There are other consistent axiomatic systems which might not rule out the possibility.

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(I'm closer to a phenomenalist than an idealist, by the way, since I regard thought, perception and consciousness as different subtypes of the same kind of thing. But that's probably of no interest to you.)

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I haven't assumed that everything is possible. I merely haven't assumed that anything is impossible; that anything is possible follows from that.

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(I draw a distinction here between what is possible and what I cannot doubt; there are things which I find myself unable to doubt which might still not be the case, as utterly inconceivable and absurd as I might find such a state of affairs. I don't place as much trust in my own ability to reason as you do.)

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I take it this argument hinges on the fact that your definition of "observe" relies on the thing being observed actually existing in some sense beyond your observation of it, since if what you "observe" were to mean absolutely everything that came into your consciousness, this would clearly be a contradiction.

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How repeatedly must something be verified to be absolutely certain without any possibility of doubt? More on this below.

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There are, of course, delusional individuals who amass supposed evidence, some real, some hallucinatory, all pointing toward a conclusion which is false to any outside observer but which the individual regards as beyond doubt. You could argue, I suppose, that such individuals invariably have a defect in rationality as well as perception, but I'm not so sure.

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Above you said that the reason you can be certain of the correspondence of your observations to reality is that those observations consistently reinforce each other. Now you're saying that some observations stand on their own as being beyond doubt. Which is it?

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I never asserted it. I just haven't been shown anything that is certain yet (even if there are some things I personally am certain of. After all, if something were by its own nature certain (rather than others being certain of it), everyone would have to be certain of it. Is there anything that everyone agrees on?

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When you observe some phenomenon, that's a discovery. When you define the nature and properties of that discovery, that's an invention. (At least, the US Patent and Trademark Office seems to think so, or it wouldn't be allowing the patenting of genes found in nature.)

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No I did not. I said the dream he claims to have had was unscientific in that it was not part of the scientific process/methodology by which he constructed a theory.

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You listed "Observation" as the very first item on your laundry list of requirements for the scientific method. If an initial scientific observation is an essential element of the scientific method, then the lack of an adequate scientific observation would mean the method as a whole was unscientific. If it's not an essential element of the scientific method, it didn't belong on the list.

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In other words, you're now arguing that a discovery can be scientifically sound without an initial scientific observation after all?

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So what was the purpose of the "Observation" item that came before "Hypothesis" on your initial list?

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Not necessarily. They could be performing a number of small tests within a limited scope, each scientific on its own, but the whole forming an incomplete picture of the world that seems to support creationism -- following the letter of the scientific method while skirting around the spirit of it.

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(I'm not sure that creation scientists are actually this wily, but it remains a possibility -- unless you want to add to your scientific method the stipulation that a scientist must be indifferent to what his experiments prove, in which case I don't think there's a scientist alive who's passed that test.)

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Well, it'd be of no consequence if logical methods were the only methods available, but that's not the case. (There are situations where intuition -- attempting to solve a problem without consciously following a logical procedure to do so -- is demonstrably better than chance, especially among people who have prior experience with solving similar problems.)

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That is, it's certain to materialists.

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So we just spent half of three replies not actually disagreeing over anything substantial. See why I usually make the effort to quibble over semantics *before* getting into a debate? :P

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(I have to say, though, your definitions seem a little circular. A "brain" is an object capable of thinking, and "thinking" is what a brain does?)

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Originally written by Le Diable d'Ouangs:

[b] My assumption is that consciousness exists; yours is that matter exists. It is simply mind-boggling to me that anyone cannot agree that it's more certain that consciousness exists than that matter exists - you were the one who brought up Descartes, after all.

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I don't explicitly choose that as an axiom. It's just that my particular view of the world doesn't admit any sort of proof except by induction, which is always subject to the possibility of a counterexample.

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I have to wonder what your method of empirical proof is; obviously, not all of your perceptions can be completely relied upon as accurate all the time, so how do you tell which ones you can consider absolutely without a shadow of a doubt 100% reliable and which ones you can't?

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If you form certainty by the aggregation of many observations which are individually subject to doubt, then keep in mind that by taking two observations that are each 99% certain, you're still only 99.99% certain, and so on. Can't get to 100% that way.

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I can't resist using the cute "1 cloud + 1 cloud = 1 cloud" argument here.

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Not that I'm suggesting we throw away arithmetic in general, of course, but it does make the point that the validity of systems like logic and arithmetic depends on the objects you apply it to. The axioms of logic and arithmetic are tools people have invented for making sense of their perceptions, not objects existing in some world of Platonic ideal forms.

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Again, these statements are based on observations you have made about roaches and automobiles.

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Which was exactly my point - it's possible for a scientific discovery to occur without any initial observation taking place at all.

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?!?!?!?

How so?

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If the discovery was scientifically unsound, surely it follows that other scientists were therefore wrong to rely on his work on its structure for other purposes.

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I'd argue that as long as creation scientists test their hypotheses adequately and without bias, what they're doing counts as science. (Of course, if they do that, they're not likely to stay creationists for very long.)

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How did you decide which first principles to hold?

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What it shows is that there are situations where logic isn't useful.

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I just don't see how you get from "Everything that thinks requires a brain" to "Everything that could think must require a brain".

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Does it prove that any possible thinking being needs its brain to think?

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As soon as you show me a thought that exists sans a brain, we will have something new to discuss on this matter.

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The onus is on you to show that no such thing could exist.

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(Unless you use a very broad definition of "brain", such as "an object capable of conducting thought processes", in which case I'll concede the point at least for all practical purposes.)

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Unless we do know everything and don't know that we know everything because we also know nothing.

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Your argument assumes that logic can in fact be consistently applied to the world.

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If it can't, then we're in one hell of a mess. But this point isn't worth arguing because it doesn't fit very well with our observations and wouldn't lead to anything useful if it were the case.

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Oh, I agree it isn't remotely practical. I was purely discussing it in terms of a thought experiment.

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Originally written by Solodric:

I'm thinking about making a scenario after I beat the rest of BoA's scenarios and I wanted to know what you guys thought of it. The scenario will be named "X Incantatrix" and will be about a lone adventuring mage (You) that wishes to become the arch-incantatrix (taking place sometime before A3, probably just before or something, since Erika seemed free at that time) I have the plot and all rough-sketched in my mind, I'm just wondering how a single-character plot would roll with the community, and whether or not people would want to play someone who aspires to be the greatest mage in Avernum by challenging Erika *Shrug*

Edit: It will involve a large number of the cast from the normal storyline, of course, and I imagine any plot-conflictions with the official storyline would grate on peoples nerves. I havent beaten A2 yet, and I dont want the story spoiled for me, but I also don't want to not know if there something important in A2 that I dont know :\

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