A New Smear Article: Interpreter Targets Givens and Hauglid

[Philo Sofee]

PG that was exceptionally interesting, thank you. Yes, and yet, the simplicity of science is what makes it so fantastic and interesting and able to then expand into far greater areas than if only a singular approach was used. I am so limited in scientific grasping that I have to be careful since I know I have overstepped my bounds, just like I do when it comes to philosophy, religion, and pretty much all disciplines. I suspect one of the things that actually keeps me going and enthusiastic is the idea of learning new things. Getting new analogies in order to see another vista, which I can hope is actually real also. I mean that new space telescope is just going to be THE BOMB in the up and coming years. It will be so blinkerin awe inspiring to see what it sees! Perhaps it is this idea of the expansion of our learning which I have always seen as spiritual.

I evaluate things like that because in religion, I have been taken advantage of, as pretty much everyone around here has nauseatingly seen me note... And, I can own that, so I perhaps take special note to go out of my way on the other side and get both extra cautious and extra exuberant in learning and continuing to keep abreast of more science, not less. I think my argument against religionists is when they make science the enemy which is just as wrong headed as Mormons saying Joseph Smith translated the papyri accurately, at least to me I have not become anti-science because religion has slapped one on me. And vice versa, for whatever reason I cannot become an enemy of spirituality because of science's successes. Somehow, someway there is an overall total usage of all that is human and has been for millenia in my thinking, and I suspect it is why I resonate with what Kishkumen is saying. I also suspect, and this may be because we are wishful thinking entities, that spirituality may never be as straight forward and open to prove or disprove because it happens within instead of out there for all to see. I try to keep both views in mind, but find science the stronger one in some ways without doubt.
Anyway, just rambling. I just really liked your analogy and am enjoying this entire thread because I see the point of the objections, and I have empathy for them (dastardly Stem's are mine also, more some days than others) since they have been and sometimes continue to be mine more strongly on some days than others. So I seem to teeter and totter back and forth as I continue trying to learn more and get clear. I guess what I am saying is I appreciate ALL the posters here, and enjoying reading the bantering and back and forth when we can do so without fighting it out, even though we have strenuous debate over things, it is a great thing in my opinion. And you are always one of my very favorite posters as so blasted many others are.

[dastardly stem]

In other words, being a materialist who might be open to the divine but is waiting for it to be demonstrated according to materialist methods and standards, you downgrade the importance of human imagination, hopes, and dreams.

I can't imagine how treating the imaginative hopes and dreams of humans as imaginative hopes and dreams of humans and not descriptions of reality is problematic. you say doing so downgrades the importance of the hopes and dreams...well, sure, if we wish to think our imaginative hopes and dreams become the basis of reality simply because we imaginatively hope and dream them. In my mind hopes and dreams should be downgraded to hopes and dreams rather than elevated to reality. It basically feels absurd to think we can call a spirit realm reality all because many people have been steeped to think there really must be a spirit realm--particularly when we have no rational basis to think there is a spirit realm. It is absolutely unreasonable to treat one's imagined desire for a spirit world as a good rational basis to think there is a spirit world. son of a bitch...did I just repeat myself again?

It is all just the flotsam and jetsam of the brain, so nothing to be overly concerned about, and certainly something dangerous to take seriously. So, I completely disagree with you, and I find your ideology to be anti-human. I don’t mean that as a knock on you, or anyone else who shares your opinion. I just find the total reliance on material tools and methods to be astoundingly narrow given the incredibly narrow lens these things provide to the totality of existence. If an ideology rejects much of what makes us human, then it is insufficient to account for our condition and guide us to a better place.

I get the difference. I hear it plenty from apologist types. As if treating humans as capable of being rational in their pursuits is a bad thing, as if if doing so somehow devalues human experience. I see it as completely the opposite. We don't just get to dream something and by virtue of one of us dreaming it that dream becomes real. Pretending like there's something to that because we really want to think there is an unfindable world that replaces or subverts our naturalist one seems to be a huge problem.

Moreover, it just seems odd to me to say that, given our human limitations, we should distrust much of what we experience in the world and narrow down our sense of reality to a razor-thin slice of phenomena.

Characterizing a naturalist perspective as a razor thin phenomena seems silly from the vantage point of a naturalist, admittedly. We should distrust human experience because our proclivity to pretend the unreal is real has proven to be problematic.

Again, we don’t have a materialist verification of the spiritual realm. My magnifying glass is doing a crap job of detecting radio waves too. What I think is going on here is that the totality of things is much more vast than we are capable of understanding with our finite minds and methods. We get little glimpses of something more, and people who look hard can get stronger intimations of other things going on, but, yes, I don’t know that we will harness spirituality as effectively as we can harness the energy of the atom, or what have you. That does not make it pointless, stupid, or bad either.

It simply makes it an untrustworthy source of describing reality. That is if we are intent on letting our imaginations go wild and in so doing imagining a reality that is not there, then we ought to accept that doing so is simply our imagination. And we should not ever be so arrogant as to think we can conjure up reality simply by dreaming something unreal. I don't see how talking ourselves off the cliff as our imaginations carry us around is a bad thing. We need to accept that our desire for more is simply a force of our ambition and is not itself a good reason to think our imagined ideas are more important than reality.

A spiritual mindset will eventually burn us? Our materialist mindset is in fact burning us right now. It is called global warning, and it is almost exclusively due to our lopsided materialist way of approaching the world. We demand more things, and we will ruin the planet to get them. That is not a gift of Christianity or Hinduism. It is a gift of capitalism and materialism.

Our only solution to global warming in any possible way will come from a naturalist perspective--the imagined supernatural isn't saving us. Yes, we can't escape that our ideologies often feel good only to demonstrate bad effects later on. Its reasonable to proceed cautiously in our ideologies, not uncap them and pretend the unreal is real.

You make that all sound so bad. Maybe it is just misdirected but not inherently bad.

Either way, it seems rather problematic to me. I can't see how it helps anyone to think any one's imagined hopes and dreams are real simply because the one hopes and dreams them.

I'm going to address a couple of larger points here. What you are saying is the type of thing I've heard from DCP and his followers over the years. And certainly, just because I've heard it from them doesn't make it bad. I just think it a bit backward to think that way. Of course it's possible that there is something beyond the natural. But to think because it's possible and so many of us really want to be adorned in the heavens one day, we can just start saying the possible is probable without sufficient reason to think so. And then if you don't accept that the possible is probable simply because you prefer attempting a rational life, then you aren't being imaginative enough...you are limiting humanity...or something. DCP often attacks materialism on such grounds. The odd thing is from his perspective (and I'm going full tu quoque now) Mormon theology is wholly material. Spirit, god, intelligence...its all just matter. But the type of matter it is, on momonism, is undetectable matter. But we can be assured its there because that was imagined to be true a couple hundred years ago by someone. That's it. There's little difference between the claims of Mormonism and every other traditional spiritual view in a sense. It's just pretending there is something we can't detect and that something is a representation of reality. I can't imagine how us responding with, "eh...believe whatever you want" is at all helpful. No. Being rational, learning to be rational is far more important in my view. And doing so will require us drop the superstitions. We'll have to reason our way out of them. There I wrapped this back in to the topic of Mormonism for the sake of the board.

Also, I can't help that all we can find it the natural. You offer a concern that since we can't verify the supernatural we ought to accept that it's real because we don't have the tools to verify it. You see it's not reasonable to suggest since we can't detect radio waves with a magnifying glass that means we ought to accept unmeasured unfound imagined supernatural exists. Once we're able to detect the supernatural in some way, you can make that point. Until then you are just hoping there is a tool out there that finds the supernatural and hoping that tool finds the supernatural. But that hope doesn't give us any reason to think there is a whole world of supernatural ready to supplant our own.

I've enjoyed this little back and forth. It's funny we struck this up in the midst of a thread dedicated to complaining that Interpreter has attacked some of it's fellow religionists (although I guess Hauglid may be pretty much in limbo as per the religion these days). Screw staying on topic, eh? My fault. but I enjoyed it. And though it feels this has run it's course to some extent, I reserve the right to respond again...hah. Just wanted to express some appreciation for the discussion.

[dastardly stem]

Yeah, I get that. But I don't see how its shallow, perhaps I am just short sighted is all. But I do know when I feel better I AM able to make more exciting videos, so there is that...

That's encouraging. Keep 'em coming, my good man.

[dastardly stem]

Magnifying glasses not affecting radio waves is a nice example of how some real things aren't accessible to some instruments. Some real things, like neutrinos and gravitational waves, are so elusive that large purpose-built devices are needed to detect them at all.

An analogy that captures some of how science can be disappointing is to consider what science would be like if reality was replaced by the game of chess.

Science would be all about pawn moves. It would exhaustively determine that individual pawns can move ahead by one square, and not backwards or sideways. It would have a huge controversy about whether pawns can really ever move two squares or whether those observations were errors. An advanced and exotic subject would be how pawns can sometimes capture other pieces by moving diagonally, though still only forwards. The en passant rule is going to be a really tough problem, and what happens to pawns that advance to the far end of the board will be the subject of after-hours speculation at conferences.

All the other pieces than pawns would be considered too complicated for science, except that a few scientists would study the king. These king specialists would be smug about how important their topic was, but they would never study anything except the fact that kings can move one square in each direction. The concept of check would be ignored as vague and untestable. And checkmate? Something that supposedly only happens once in a whole game, for some reason, and sometimes never at all, for reasons that no-one can explain? Stuff for philosophers, obviously. Let them deal with such questions of ultimate purpose or whatever. Science will focus on moves, thank you very much. Moves are clear, except for that awful first pawn move.

Nothing about strategy in chess would be part of this chess science, and nothing even about tactics. Pins, forks, gambits, sacrifices—nope. So is this chess science an adequate description of chess? Hardly. Most of what makes chess interesting is missing entirely.

Obviously actual science copes with things a lot more complex than pawn moves, but actual reality is also a lot more complex than chess. In the proportion of the analogy, restricting science to pawn moves is reasonable, I think. Science focuses on the simplest aspects of reality, because they are simple enough to understand very thoroughly. That's it.

It's great to understand anything thoroughly. And it's silly to fail to understand something well, when it actually is simple enough that we could understand it, if we tried. But to suppose that only things simple enough to be understood by humans scientifically can be real is to ignore too much of reality.

Fair enough. And I hope its clear I'm not saying only things we can understand scientifically can be real. It does just so happen though, that when it comes to us understanding reality, science happens to be the best game in town. With that I get why that confuses the matter a bit.

[Kishkumen]

I don’t have time right now to respond in full to stem’s latest, but I will offer a few preliminary thoughts. Of course it makes a great deal of sense to most people of our times to equate rationality, materiality, and reality, as though the three overlap completely without any room for the rational to be immaterial or for the real to include anything that is immaterial. This was not always the general view, and it isn’t even necessarily true.

But people speak confidently as though these things were self-evidently the case, and they mock those who disagree. Of course, it is predictable that discredit by association is brought in—“How could anyone agree with anything the apologists might say? Bad sign!” But one should instead be wary of the use of the unpopularity of certain persons as a way of dismissing certain ideas.

I think it is safe to say that operating on a day to day basis as materialists is what our world demands of us. Even religion has been dragged into materialism and often for the worse. And yet I tend to think that Philo is right about the crucial nature of the imagination. I would say that hope and dreams are just as crucial, no matter how trite that may sound to you.

I don’t expect you to buy what I am saying because the task is much like selling communism at CPAC. People are so well ensconced in their worldview that other views sound risible on their face. But I wholeheartedly disagree that the only worthwhile and effective answers to problems like climate change are to be found in science as understood within a materialist paradigm. Materialism has brought us to the brink of annihilation, and thinking it will save us is something like spending our way to prosperity.

[sock puppet]

Spirituality and religion are in my view two distint things. I see religion as a way for some to monetize their self-proclaimed superior spirituality. For example, tithes. Religion leverages others' feelings (spirituality, if you will) in order to make material gains. Religionists don't mind peddling spirituality as a means to gain material, but chafe at the idea that materialism ought not be involved in the spiritual. Most convenient for their scam even despite the obvious inconsistency.

[Kishkumen]

Spirituality and religion are in my view two distint things. I see religion as a way for some to monetize their self-proclaimed superior spirituality. For example, tithes. Religion leverages others' feelings (spirituality, if you will) in order to make material gains. Religionists don't mind peddling spirituality as a means to gain material, but chafe at the idea that materialism ought not be involved in the spiritual. Most convenient for their scam even despite the obvious inconsistency.

OK. Fair enough. It is also a way people organize into communities that can utilize resources for the benefit of the community and the realization or their devotional or spiritual aims. But, yes, it seems like the dominance of materialism has arguably tainted the use of such resources and tools. That said, you speak as though every religious organization is a scam. Not all such organizations are the same or operate on the same basis.

I don’t think the LDS Church is a scam. I do think it does involve a tragic misuse of resources for questionable or uncertain aims. That said, I think temples and chapels are good resources for the community. Hundred-billion-dollar investment funds not so much.

[Rivendale]

I see. Thank you for the clarification. The winds of the soul that one thinks comes from an external source competing against a naturalistic framework that claims it is merely subterranean mind vat of possible ideas. Stating that the brain merely provides the reservoir and nature provides the darwinian survival of ideas must be a real pebble in the shoe for believers.

So, the more I have learned about the sophistication of ancient thought regarding the nature of existence, and here I am mostly thinking of Neoplatonic thought, the more I see that today most of us are playing in a conceptual two-dimensional sandbox. When you say “external source” and “naturalistic framework,” all I can say is that is a limiting and simplistic framework. Left with that narrow range of possibilities, I see why we get trapped in this unproductive dichotomy, but I can tell you that the people who are familiar with a richer concept of the full range of possibilities don’t find the naturalistic model to be a “pebble in the shoe” so much as a stunning oversimplification.

Thank you for the response. To me platonic thought is a rejection of empiricism in favor of believing in an unseen world. Until I have evidence for the entry and exit into the cave I will probably stay watching the shadows.

[Kishkumen]

Thank you for the response. To me platonic thought is a rejection of empiricism in favor of believing in an unseen world. Until I have evidence for the entry and exit into the cave I will probably stay watching the shadows.

It is not a rejection of empiricism. It predates empiricism by over two millennia.

[Symmachus]

Thank you for the response. To me platonic thought is a rejection of empiricism in favor of believing in an unseen world. Until I have evidence for the entry and exit into the cave I will probably stay watching the shadows.

It is not a rejection of empiricism. It predates empiricism by over two millennia.

It didn't predate it; its devotees just hadn't discovered the idea of empiricism yet.