"Are you a humanist?" topic closed (to the edge)

wilmon91 wrote: Dean wrote: There is a world of difference between a musician and a non-musician, I don't agree, but of course it depends on in what respect of difference you are talking about (but lets not get deeper into that)

There is only one aspect that has any value in the context we are talking about. Those that are not are irrelevant. However, this line of enquiry is going nowhere.

wilmon91 wrote: Dean wrote: Give me one question that a philosopher has answered. They only deal with questions.

Which is my point, but pray continue...

wilmon91 wrote: I think from late 18th century and forward, the western philosophy became adapted more to the scientific way of producing theories, were you are focused on making arguments that hold against any critical questions that challenges it. The important thing is that few questions are a subject in itself, it is always related to other things, and it's very common that the problems have to do with how you define the words you are using, so semantics is always relevant.   You can derive a question from any statement or claim. For example "The house is blue" holds a question "What color is the house?" (Wittgenstein pointed that out).

Dunno, it does not seem correct to me, but perhaps you picked a poor example. "The house is blue" is an assertive statement. This is assertion is falsifiable (contrary evidence can prove it wrong, "The house is either blue or it is not blue").

 

That assertive statement can be converted to a question by used of the rising intonation, which syntactically we denote in the written word as a interrogation mark '?', i.e., "The house is blue?".

 

The statement can also be turned into a question by moving the "is" to the beginning of the statement, for example "Is the house blue" is no longer an assertion but a question so syntactically would require an interrogation mark "Is the house blue?" even though it does not require a rising intonation when spoken. The "is" now becomes an interrogative rather than an assertion.

 

The statement can also be turned into a question by the use of an interrogative phrase at the end of the statement as a tag-question, for example "The house is blue, isn't it?" ... however now we cannot be sure whether this is a question (a doubting question) or an assertive statement (a rhetorical question) - this ambiguity is removed in the spoken word by the use of the rising intonation, but not so in the written word, (we have to use context to determine that).

 

However, none of these converted questions ask what colour the house is because they can all be answered with a simple Yes or No answer while the question "What colour is the house?" cannot. "The house is blue" does not 'hold' the question "What colour is the house?" therefore I doubt that this does illustrate what Ludo Wittgenstein was pointing out but I would have to read precisely what he wrote to be sure (and I have no inclination to do that). 

 

Having been told that "The house is blue" then changing this into the question "What colour is the house?" seems to me to be the one question that does not require asking ... [Am I missing something obvious here?] ... The statement "The house is blue." can prompt dozens of questions, such as "Why is the house blue?", "Is the house depressed?", "Are all houses blue?", "What shade of blue is the house?", "Has the house always been painted that colour?", "Why is the house absorbing all the colours in the visible spectrum except blue?"... 

 

...when one of my friends asked me "what day does Friday fall on this week?" I had no idea he was a philosopher, I just thought he was a drummer. 

 

I do not question the necessity of questions, nor do I question that the phrasing of the question is of utmost importance, especially when you want to stand any chance of understanding the answer.

 

wilmon91 wrote: But here are some questions.. What is the relation between cause and effect? What brings about the greatest happiness? What is the ego? (or what does it do?) What is image? What is a whole? What is virtue? What is the absolute?

Yup ... those are great questions but I did not ask for a list of questions that a Philosopher might ask, I asked for one question that a Philosopher has answered.

wilmon91 wrote: Dean wrote: wilmon91 wrote: Dean wrote: Some think Fred Nietzsche or Manni Kant were cool dudes because they agree with some of what those dead guys wrote, as if having it stated in a formal doctrine by some academic navel gazer affirms their view of the world. Then the problem is the people who choose a favourite philosopher and then sticks with that instead of challenging those ideas. Reading philosophy is not supposed to be a practise were you are subject to persuasion.  You are free to reject any concepts you don't agree with. Then what is the point? (rhetorical, please don't answer it) The question is too unclear to be answerable.

Rhetorical questions are not there to be answered, but for clarity:

 

If you are free to reject any concepts you don't agree with then what is the point of philosophy? 

wilmon91 wrote: Dean wrote: We separated philosophy from the useful sciences a long time ago, you cannot keep harping back to the dead Greek guys whenever you need to prove how useful philosophers are. That ship has sailed sunk.   So you have your own idea of separating things into "useful" and not useful". Before you said "Areas that are not the concern of science will never be explained by science.".  and now you say "We separated philosophy from the useful sciences a long time ago". So that equals: 'What can never be explained by science is not useful.'

No it doesn't. You have treated subject and object as being the same when they are not.

 

If something is useful without explanation then it remains as useful after it has been explained and it remains useful even if an explanation cannot be found. 

 

Conversely if something that has no explanation is not useful now then it will remain useless. However there is a possibility that it could be useful if we could explain it, but that is not a certainty.

 

If you have an explanation for something then that explanation becomes useful in its own right. Often the explanations are more useful than the observation they initially explained.

 

For example we knew how to lob a rock at a castle's defensive wall before Newton. The Greek, Roman and medieval armies all had catapult type weapons and were very accurate with them. They knew if you threw it up in the air it came down again, if you threw it harder it went up higher. They also knew if you changed the angle at which you threw it you could change how far it went. They could also draw the shape its flight made through the air and they knew it was a parabola. But they could not explain any of it. Newton's explanation of projectile motion explained why the rock followed a specific parabolic path through the air (trajectory), how high it would go and how far it would fly for any given weight of rock. When the force to launch it was greater than the force of gravity pulling it down the rock went up, when the force was less than the force of gravity it came down, the launch angle determined how far it would travel horizontally before its vertical travel returned to zero. This same explanation could then used to explain how that trajectory could be made to follow the curve of the earth and never fall to the ground (i.e., how to put a rock into orbit around the Earth). That same explanation can then be used to explain the orbit of the a really large rock (like the Moon) around the Earth, and then a really really large rock (like the Earth) around the Sun. This simple explanation explains all flight, whether that is an electron, an atom, a molecule, rock, a bullet, a rocket, a missile, a satellite, an aeroplane, a moon, asteroid, meteor, comet, planet, star... One simple explanation of how a rock fired from a catapult hits a castle wall explains the motion of the planets around the sun and much more besides. That's why explanations are so useful. Far more useful than an unanswered question.

 

Now. A thing that cannot be explained can be useful, but how useful would the explanation be if we knew it?

 

A question is a useful question if it leads to a useful answer or a useful explanation. 

 

If you gain pleasure by pondering questions that do not lead to useful answers or explanations then I suppose that has served a useful purpose to you. 

wilmon91 wrote: About the greeks, they are the core of western philosophy, and it's the foundation of science with its logical inference. Most of what constitutes modern science is knowledge from before the time of modern science. To have a philosophic mind is very useful in combination with being a mathematician for example, and there are many such examples. A mathematician + philosopher would in your simple view be a person dealing with something useful on the one hand and something useless on the other. You think that everything can be divided in any number of categories, and each will be fully independent. The problem is that you lose the meaning of it. The purpose of philosophy is not to be separated from everything else.

You cannot keep harping back to dead Greek guys whenever you need to prove how useful philosophers are. Yes philosophy exists within mathematics and science. We don't need Philosophers for that, for science+philosophy we need people who understand mathematics, quantum physics, molecular biology, astrophysics, etc. ...  i.e., Scientists. 

wilmon91 wrote: Dean wrote: Philosophy explains nothing, A too short comment , for effects sake, with no clarification.

Mea culpa - the comma is not a typo, I intended to clarify the comment but could not express my thoughts into words. I left the remark unfinished intending to return to it later, but forgot. Sorry.

 

So, let's put it back into context and try again:

 

wilmon91 wrote: Does this mean that there is nothing to be explained?

 that's a poor assumption, even for me. 

 

You have said "They only deal with questions" ... which is why I asked you for one question that a philosopher has answered.

 

If philosophers have not answered a single question then they have not explained anything.

 

There is a whole wealth of questions whose answers could explain a myriad of things. Those explanations would be immeasurably more valuable than the questions or the answers.

 

wilmon91 wrote: You haven't read all of philosophy (I don't think you have read a lot), so you need to explain how to make this conclusion. That goes without saying - so why do I even respond to this?

I do not study subjects that I have no interest in, Philosophy is neither my profession nor my hobby, I do not need to read all (or a lot) of philosophy to form an opinion. You chose to respond because you thought (and probably still think) I was "attacking philosophy itself".

 

I didn't bring philosophy into this discourse and would have preferred that you hadn't. I'll respond to anyone and everyone who comments on one of my posts. If you brought up a different subject then I'll would have most likely responded to that too. If you or I could work Spurious Free Dynamic Range measurements of an Analogue To Digital Converter into this thread then I'd happily discuss that.

wilmon91 wrote: Dean wrote: I cannot take away philosophy. Have you read anything I have posted here? I have no beef with philosophy, only philosophers (and perhaps Philosophy the academic discipline) That is the way you present your opinion. But it equals nonsense. You are deliberately not informative , but never mind, it's still off topic!

Yup, it's nonsense. Diverting nonsense, but nonsense just the same. If philosophy can be simplified as "thinking about stuff" then I cannot argue against it, at no point have I ever said "we must not think about these things".

 

wilmon91 wrote: Dean wrote: wilmon91 wrote: Dean wrote: you can say god exists but you don't believe in him.   But the meaning of that is hard to see. Not relevant.  The point is that belief in the existence of something does not mean you believe in that thing. Or to rephrase that: acceptance in the existence of something does not mean you have faith in that thing, That depends on what it is, of course. I don't need to have faith in a mountain that I believe exists on another planet, because faith isn't needed, there is no important relation between me and the mountain. It's all about the nature of what you believe in , and your relation to it.

The relationship between you and the mountain is not relevant. It matters not where the mountain is. If you have not witnessed it you can still accept that it exists because a mountain is a physical object so its existence is evidence-based and that is falsifiable. Therefore this example is not an example of what we are discussing. The existence of a mountain (or my daughter) is falsifiable, the existence of gods is not.

wilmon91 wrote: Dean wrote: wilmon91 wrote: Dean wrote: Are there rules for what can and cannot be an -ism? When it is limited to become only a definition of one sentence, it seems a little silly to me. There you go with the offensive word again. It does not answer the question. Are there rules for what can and cannot be an -ism? There must be criteria of course (not rules), probably not very strict, that's why we have so many -isms. There are psychological -isms, and they are not "inventions" in the same way as -isms that are the result from opposing or rejection of something where this becomes the -ism. My opinion is that for the sake of sorting different opinions into categories, it has functional. But for someone to just pick one -ism and say -"I am a xxxx-ist." can create more confusion than it clarifies.   But to the point - post-theism as an answer to the question of what you believe in, is not an answer to that question.

Agreed and accepted. It is a convenient noun-phrase, nothing more. It helps me look at the subject from a greater distance away from the centre (god-centric or human-centric). From a theist or an atheist perspective the subject is still god-centric, humanism is human-centric. 

wilmon91 wrote: Dean wrote: wilmon91 wrote: Dean wrote: You can either explain something or you cannot. There is nothing circular in this, nor does it beg the question. Things you can't explain may constitue a large part of reality. We have our five senses. Why should we limit our thinking to our physical limits? We have more than five senses.   You can either explain something or you cannot. That sentence doesn't explain what you mean. It's up to me to interpret it as usual. Yes, you can either explain or not - at a given moment. At a later moment, it's the same. But what was previously unexplainable then may have become explainable now.    My above comment is still my answer to this.

It is a common misconception that we have only five senses because we have five prominent sense organs. We have more than five sense organs and can sense more than five senses, for example we can sense temperature, kinetics, balance, acceleration, pain and a host of other physiological things, and we can also sense things that are not dependant on sense-organs like time and emotional things like fear and anxiety. Our perception of the world around us is not limited to five senses. We also know that these senses can be suppressed, heightened, cross-wired, overloaded, false-triggered, misinterpreted and fooled and this in turn can result in misinterpretation of conflicting sensory information so that non-physical things can appear to be real.

 

I wasn't talking about "now" - I am talking about "ever".

 

If we can later explain something at was unexplained then that something was always explainable.

 

The motion of a rock fired from a catapult was not something that could not be explained, it was always explainable even when we hadn't worked out what the explanation was.

 

Before we can attempt to explain the unexplained (such as mind-reading, telekinesis, intuition) we first have to determine that those things are genuine phenomenon that can be repeated and observed and then determine whether they can be explained. If these phenomena are not genuine then the explanation is not of the phenomena themselves but in how our physical senses misinterpreted the sensory evidence that produced them. For some that explanation may be unpalatable, just as evolution is unpalatable to those who believe the world was created in six literal days. 

 

This applies to the perception and understanding of the non-physical too.

wilmon91 wrote: Dean wrote: wilmon91 wrote: Dean wrote: I specifically said that science is not a religion and science does not cover spiritual needs Dean wrote: I did not say that science would explain all that is explainable, I said the explanations would not require belief in god. No but you described post-theism, which seems to be a mental limitation to only encompass what science have found. The special thing about humans is that we can have an idea of what we haven't found yet. Believing in what we haven't yet found is rational, not believing in what we haven't found is irrational. The next thing is to form ideas of these unknown things. The idea of God is of something all-encompassing. So no matter the multitude of realities and things, there is something that connects everything according to this thought. Believing in modern science is believing in a meagre amount of knowledge. In 500 years the situation will be different. You can believe in the progress of science but you don't need to limit your thinking to it. I get the feeling that you're not listening any more. I don't believe in science. Science is not a belief-system. Science is a tool not a religion. But you haven't said anything about your own beliefs whichever they may be. You have however implicated that the knowledge in modern science was the useful stuff that was extracted from all the other useless fields of human thought. You haven't talked about anything useful that is outside of the science department.

Perhaps, perhaps not - (science is not a belief system and neither is my view of post-theism) - I have listed many of the things I do not believe in:

 

Are these my beliefs? Isn't not-believing the same thought-process as believing.

 

wilmon91 wrote: What am I not listening to?

It is a "feeling" I get when you repeat a statement I have already explained. If you do not understand or accept the explanation then question that explanation, not the original statement (again).

wilmon91 wrote: Dean wrote: wilmon91 wrote: The primary purpose of a god-belief I don't think is to explain things though. The inexplainable/inscrutable is something you are supposed to reach by inner experience and intuiting. Intuit-ing? That's just guessing without thinking isn't it? Stern Smile It's supposed to be a way to reach the "inner light"- the 6th sense.

The "the 6th sense" has not been demonstrated to be a genuine phenomenon. Personally I do not expect that it ever will be. I suspect that most, if not all, occurrences of "the 6th sense" can be readily explained without recourse to premonition, foretelling or spiritual input. Intuition is NOT accessing "the 6th sense". Intuition is instinctively knowing something without the need for conscious reasoning... guessing [the right answer] without thinking. When we guess the wrong answer we do not call this intuition.

 

Intuition comes in two basic forms. Instinct and Insight, and they in turn have many forms. Insight (IMO) is the rarer of the two.

 

Understanding intuition requires us to understand how we arrived at each intuitive understanding without the need for conscious reasoning. Evidence of intuitive thought is problematic because we tend to remember the guesses that prove to be right and overlook those that were wrong. Coincidence does happen more than we think it does. If you are thinking of a friend minutes before they 'phone you then that is coincidence not insight. I can do many things intuitively because I can apply the knowledge I have gained without having to re-think it from first principles each time I need it - it's like a having a look-up table of sine-functions instead of recalculating the value from the Taylor Series each time - it's quicker and does not require mental computation (conscious reasoning). Often what we call Intuition, Instinct or Insight is the application of experience (prior-knowledge).

 

I suspect that all forms of apparent intuition are dependant upon prior-knowledge in some form, but first we would need to identify instances of intuition that could not be explained by coincidence.

wilmon91 wrote: Dean wrote: wilmon91 wrote: Dean wrote: Areas that are not the concern of science will never be explained by science. Not unless it evolves and changes over time. Then that would not be science. I don't agree, because modern science didn't start from scratch. Knowledge evolved during thousands of years, and now it is made into a system with many independent divisions , and a lot is left out of this system.... but I don't see why it couldn't evolve , if we look far ahead, but it would require big events that cause the beginning of such a change. Modern science doesn't "own" the knowledge that it uses and discovers. That 's my opinion.

Science is not a closed-system and science has never "owned" any knowledge, that's how it works, it simply could not function otherwise. Within science fields and disciplines merge and diverge constantly and there is little or nothing that can be regarded as independent (or ever was). Science changes constantly as more knowledge is accrued ['If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants'] but the modern science is the same science of Aristotle (damn dead Greek) - this is not the "evolution" I suspected you were implying.

wilmon91 wrote: Dean wrote: wilmon91 wrote: Mankind as a species have evolved in a remarkable way compared to other animals. I think the reason is related to the desire to know things. But survival instinct is not what sets us apart from other species.   I don't think we are separate from other animals. Different - yes, special - no.    Survival instinct make us the same as other species - that is our commonality - but it is also what makes us different. We are all animals.   If you stop and think about the human body it is probably the single most useless body in the animal kingdom.You're going to have to think hard to think of a body that is worse at doing all or any of the things necessary for survival. We have no fur so need to clothe ourselves to keep warm, in most of the environments we habit we cannot survive without first making shelter and fire yet our bodies are not equipped to do any of that. We cannot live off most of the plants that grow on earth and have no natural ability to tell those we can feed on and those that will kill us. We are not equipped with teeth or claws to kill and butcher an animal yet we are naturally omnivorous. We lack the speed and power to catch and kill a prey yet we are predatory and we cannot out-run or out fight those predators that could kill us but we have no natural predators. Much of the food we can eat needs to be prepared before we can chew and/or swallow and/or digest it, and that often involves cooking, which in turn involves fire, yet we our bodies are not equipped with anything that enable us to do any of that. We cannot survive on instinct and intuition. We survive by learning. Learning is not unique to humans, plenty of animals learn from their parent, but we are the only one who has to be taught everything we need to survive.    Yet we have evolved to be like this. Naturally and without help from a supernatural entity. And that's pretty impressive.   We survive because we can reason and learn. This is possible because we have evolved a brain that allows this to happen. Our survival tool is our brain, not our fur or our claws or our teeth.   Once you have a brain that is large enough to enable a feeble-bodied predator such as homo sapiens to survive then that brain will be large enough to do other things when we are not using it for survival.   I do not think there is any wondrous magic in our ability to think beyond survival. It certainly does not warrant an -ology..   I'm sorry to have to disagree again. Our bodies, useless compared to other animals? Who would say that? You want fur and claws? That was us millions of years ago. We don't want evolve backwards into a state like that. But we've evolved our brains like you say. It is an evolution of consciousness. This evolution have had an exponential progress.

I'm sorry, but I must have failed to explain myself. 

 

I did not say our bodies were useless, I said they were probably the single most useless body in the animal kingdom. The qualification provide by the extra words in their correct context is IMPORTANT. If you take my words out of context and change their meaning then you are not disagreeing with me, you are disagreeing with a (completely different) statement that I did not make.

 

An evolution of brain capacity and capability is not an evolution of consciousness. Nor does it result in the loss of fur or claws. We do not have fur because we have subcutaneous fat instead and this one of the major physiological differences that differentiates us from all other extant species of ape. How we evolved this means of keeping warm is as yet unresolved, all other species that have this method of maintaining body temperature are aquatic or semi-aquatic and that could be indicative, but this is as yet unproven in human evolution. However, this fat layer is inefficient in a non-aquatic environment so we need clothing to substitute for fur. None of that can be explained by having an enlarged brain or "evolved consciousness" (regardless of what Gen 2:7 would have us believe ). Our capacity to think has enabled us to adapt to different environments but it has not altered our evolution. Exponential evolution occurred in many other species as they adapted to dramatic changes in environment (punctuated equilibrium) so human evolution is not unique here. The point of the exponential function is that it starts with an incredibly rapid rate of change that very quickly slows down but never actually stops, (it is asymptotic), this means that the major changes in physiology occurred over a remarkably short time period in comparison to more stable 'equilibrium' state. Now we can change our environment to fit our physiology so our physiology is no longer evolving to adapt to changing environments - if anything this ability to adapt externally has slowed evolution even more, our physiology has remained pretty much constant for 250,000 years including living through several ice-ages during that period.

wilmon91 wrote: Dean wrote: I don't think we are separate from other animals. Different - yes, special - no. Different, but not special? Vague...

 I'm posting on a Progressive Music forum, not writing an academic thesis. When I want a critique I'll ask for one. 

wilmon91 wrote: Humans are in a category by themselves from other animals. It's because of their minds, their thinking ability ,their self-awareness.

Our "specialness" from animals is currently inconclusive (and probably man's biggest arrogance). Certainly other animals have demonstrated possible self-awareness but since we do not fully understand that in ourselves this area of research is in its infancy.

wilmon91 wrote: Name some creative animals that produces art? They haven't got the self-awareness and intellect.

Art is not a measure, it is a communication of abstract thought, other animals use display and create lures to attract a mate or food, this is also the communication of an abstract thought. But I covered this in a later post.

 

Elephants, dolphins, primates, dogs and cats have been shown to be self-aware.

 

Most animals have intelligence of some form or other. Since intellect is the ability to learn and reason then this too has been demonstrated in several species of animal, including small-brained animals such as birds. Intellect can also be described as the ability of the mind to come to correct conclusions about what is true or real - if you place a new born human or kitten in front of a mirror for the first time they both react is if it were real, then they will both look behind the mirror to see if the reflected image is behind it, from then on they ignore the mirror; my cat knows that a photograph or reflection in a mirror is not real, moreover, if she sees something reflected in the mirror that is behind her then she will look round - this is thought to demonstrate self-awareness but is this also a sign of intellect at work?

 

How we measure intelligence and intellect is subjective. Mankind is an intelligent idiot most of the time.

 

We have only recently thrown off the shackle that man was given dominion over all animals (Gen 1:28) - we have a lot of learning to do.

 

wilmon91 wrote: Dean wrote: Atheism is not anti-religion therefore does not oppose religiousness.  There are of course atheists like Dawkins who are also anti-religion, but they are a minority. A vocal minority, but a minority. Not anti-religion, but it defines itself by saying "I don't believe the thing that they believe". It's distancing itself from god-beliefs, and that very distancing is the base of the -ism.

Sorry, you've lost me. Are you now saying that atheism is not allowed to be an -ism either? I think you are perhaps misunderstanding what an -ism is. Not all -isms are beliefs (sexism, racism, patriotism, criticism....)

Apology not needed, we both played the game. I expected you'd probably change your avatar and you did. You responded to my comment with a snipe and that wasn't unexpected either.

SteveG wrote: To make you feel better, you did indeed  answer my question, but in the most useless convoluted way possible with your 500 plus word treastise. Was that really needed? And for what purpose? I don't think you need to impress anyone here. Perhaps you feel that your words well stand for all eternity. Many others have felt the same way. Does anyone even know of more than 1% of the recorded works of history, let alone who wrote them. Alot of people do know the story of Don Quixote and his fight with the windmills, though.

If you cannot cope with anything more than a snappy sound-bite then don't read what I write. I cannot write in a concise manner, it simply is not who I am. I'm not comfortable with people reading between the lines so I write so there is no space between the lines. I write replies that say what I think even if it is nonsense; many people write replies telling me what other people think, echoing words that other people have written and frankly I'm not interested in any of that, I want to know what the person who is writing the reply thinks, for me that is far more interesting to read. 

I have already explained that my words are ephemeral and not written for any desire for immortality, that you prefer to disbelieve that is not something I can do a great deal about. I'll not stop writing long posts on any subject that piques my interest as a result. 

That it is.

You'll have to tell me what my agenda is sometime because I have no idea what it is myself. I used to like Anathema when they were a metal band, not so enthralled by them now. 

 

 

I think we need a thread so the Alpha Males can slug it out.

As in TL;DR?

The stamps man?

Anyway we should join forces then. My upstairs compartment is a wild place at the moment. Too much paperwork without any real enjoyment or thrills, and perhaps too much focusing on stuff that has nothing to do with my studies altogether ie procrastinating the inevitable by reading Aldous Huxley instead of the official Danish law sections on child care In my defence, Huxley is a far more interesting read.