Philosophy Discussion Forums | A Humans-Only Club for Open-Minded Discussion & Debate

[Papus79]

I think that's part of what makes good philosophy almost more challenging than good science - ie. it's much more difficult to twist the numbers than constantly redial the scope, weight, and meaning of concepts in self-insulating ways.

That said I remember Jordan Peterson throwing something out in one of his lectures about how much calculation and time it would take for a supercomputer to chew through all possible chess games - his estimation may have been a bit overblown but I think the core idea behind it speaks well to just what kinds of complexity we're looking at when it comes to biology, the mechanics of consciousness, and whatever else. Physics, as challenging as it is, is the closest thing to a layman's in-depth grasp, the rest we tend to just give up on and look for repeatable patterns.

[Ranvier]

I agree, there are as many concepts as there are minds. The question becomes: Is there anything that can be taken for granted?

[Burning ghost]

Eduk -

I've heard that stated a lot. What is the number one assumption that all Skeptics bring to the table?

Themselves and the table. Meaning "existence" at large.

Being skeptical is not the same as doubting everything. Doubting is not the same as skepticism.

I would add that being able to hold something up to doubt is to know it. To be unable to apply any kind of "question" to something proves its non-existence. haha!!

[-1-]

I agree, there are as many concepts as there are minds. The question becomes: Is there anything that can be taken for granted?

*Taking notes: There used to be two concepts at the beginning of Biblical creation.

Now there are much more many concepts.

** Answer: Grants can be taken for granted. Loans shouldn't be taken for granted.

The question becomes: Our bodies are definitely borrowed. Are our minds our own at this hour?
Are our minds granted to us, or we just take them for granted?

-- Updated 2017 July 29th, 9:37 am to add the following --

Doubting is not the same as skepticism.

What's the difference? Not a trick question, I honestly don't know. I am genuinely seeking information.

-- Updated 2017 July 29th, 9:42 am to add the following --

If our minds are given to us, and our bodies are rented / loaned, then who is "us"? We own our own minds. But we are not our body, and absolutely not our own minds. We have a spirit, a soul, as well. So we HAVE it, the person who owns it is us.

Who is this misterious "us" or "me", who owns a mind, a spirit, and for a while, a body as well?

If we take away body, mind and spirit, there is nothing left, but you can't add body, mind and spirit to nothing, they are given / granted /rented / loaned to US.

So US are something which has no mind, body, spirit, and yet WE exist. But ONLY after mind, body and/or spirit is given to US.

This is bugging me. Killing me, in fact.

I'll make a thread out of this, I think it's worth the bother.

[Burning ghost]

Doubt is just to doubt this or that explanation.

To be skeptical is to doubt that there is any real explanation.

There are of course MANY facets to the topic of skepticism, as with all philosophical ideas. We generally except that we cannot be skeptical about the mathematical abstraction of 1+1=2. Abstract universals are necessarily beyond skepticism, and doubt. What we can be skeptical about is its application to non-mathematical space, even though we do not doubt that we have two eyes, we can be skeptical about the application of mathematical abstracts to space in general.

Pedantry also plays a part. "Doubt" and "Skeptic" have completely different sources. One is from French and the other from Greek. The etymology although not taken as an obvious difference today in colloquial use, still plays a significant part in philosophical language. In philosophy skepticism is usually (as far as I know) regarded as something entwined with epistemology and ideas of "truth".

The irony I was trying to point out above is that the skeptic has to "exist". This is also an application of a certain abstract that is not universal, the application of language. Then we get into the ontological problem and so on and so on.

Somewhere within this mess is where the theist may, or may not, flip-flop between these ideas without realizing that they are logically incompatible.

[-1-]

Doubt is just to doubt this or that explanation.

To be skeptical is to doubt that there is any real explanation.

This is not quite clear yet... the skeptic doubts that there is any real explanation, or he doubts that there is any real explanation to only certain things, while other things do have a real explanation?

This is a very important difference. Please, please, clarify for me.

[Burning ghost]

I am useless at describing crap like this.. Google it!! hahaa!!

Skepticism is PHILOSOPHICAL and DOUBT is just like ... "Er .. y wot? I doubt it man!" The former being established by method rather than blind opinion.

For example I may doubt that feathers fall at the same velocity as cannon balls. The skeptic on watching someone drop the two from atop a building will not accept the result as conclusive and ask further questions such as the aerodynamics of each object and other factors. Skeptics set out to try and deny the appearance of a "truth", where the doubter do no more than express their uncertainty about something.

It is an epistemic issue. Doubt is more of a psychological matter I guess, not really a "philosophical" approach.

If you read any philosophy you'll see a great deal of attention paid to use of terms. Often within philosophy there is such a vast array of jargon that it can be very difficult to understand one philosophers view from another. This is why people tend to prefer analytic philosophy and accuse continental philosophy of being of limited use.

You can probably guess I that I tend to fall more in the "continental" category. Although mostly it is wishful thinking on my part being nothing other than a verbose fool

IF you don't like any of that then simply look up Occam's Razor and its Scientific application. The very term is a pet hate of mine as is "strawman".

My problem is I don't really understand any of the questions people ask anymore and find more interest in trying to figure out what they mean, or don't mean, than I do attempting to pose dozens of possible answers to th evarious interpretations I can glean from said question!

note: I am maybe a bit of bastard in that respect

[-1-]

So you don't know the difference, BG, and you don't even know if there is a difference...then why say that skepticism and doubt are different.

This is a very sad day for me. I argued earlier with two completely schizophrenic users, and now my best friend on this site is breaking down on the definition level...

Vimy, oh Dawkins, Vimy.

Time to take another mini-holiday away from this site until I calm down.

-- Updated 2017 July 29th, 2:18 pm to add the following --

Used the wrong word/ expression... "from this site until I calm down" ought to be substituted by "form this site until I shake it all down".

-- Updated 2017 July 29th, 2:21 pm to add the following --

... not "form this site" but "from this site".

[Aristocles]

If you read any philosophy you'll see a great deal of attention paid to use of terms. Often within philosophy there is such a vast array of jargon that it can be very difficult to understand one philosophers view from another. )

Iaepetus post # 10 to Sandro seemed to capture a progressive response to the original question.

There did appear to be confusion in terms.

Does anybody disagree with post #10?

[Burning ghost]

Seriously? Google "The difference between doubt and skepticism". It is presented there. I know the difference, you were the one asking. I expressed it enough I thought. I am not the greatest person to come to for simply explanations because my simplicity often turns into complexity.

The crux of the difference is one uses philosophical method and the other doesn't. Further still I didn't bother to mention the root of skepticism being associated with opposition to religious ideologies.

I think I already mentioned that the OP seems to be stretching the use of Occham's Razor too? I may very well be wrong there though. Just felt like commenting on what I commented about.

[-1-]

Seriously? Google "The difference between doubt and skepticism".

I did. I had the following three returns of note:

They can have the same meaning (having doubt) but "sceptical" has a more active and analytical implication, while "doubtful" can mean something more like "uncertain".

Doubting is skepticism

Doubt and skepticism have no necessary differences. To be skeptical of something is to doubt something.

===

There were some returns that purported there were differences, but I did not need to be skeptical about those, I did not need to doubt them, because they were supported by a description that was easily shut down.

-- Updated 2017 July 29th, 4:49 pm to add the following --

If you read any philosophy you'll see a great deal of attention paid to use of terms. Often within philosophy there is such a vast array of jargon that it can be very difficult to understand one philosophers view from another. )

Iaepetus post # 10 to Sandro seemed to capture a progressive response to the original question.

There did appear to be confusion in terms.

Does anybody disagree with post #10?

I am all the way behind Iaepetus. Although he misspelled the word "theist" or "atheist", forgot now which of the two.

My opinion here covers Iaepetus' argument and skepticism (proof against, not merely doubt) of god being infinitely complex, and altogether invalidating the original post's proposition. This was not a semantics argument; this was a logical argument, I felt.

The confusion was not over the terms; the confusion stemmed from examining exactly what some of the expressions meant and implied. The terms were not altered, and they were not redefined to be different from their nominative meaning (normative meaning). Neither party altered the semantic meaning of "infinitely complex", one only pointed out that it contains infinite self-contradictions and it can't be larger than the universe itself, so what is it exactly.

Iaepetus also commented on the fact that currently no measure of complexity exists. The original argument used the expressions (maybe?) "less complex" and "more complex", but there is no objective way of defining levels or measures of complexity.

[Aristocles]

Agreed about truth claims related to complexity for which we are unable to measure...

My view of "term confusion," is more of a philosophical fundamental view that saying something is logical or not when we really are writing about truth/false statements, (i.e. god exists) can be confusing to assume logic equates to truth. We know logic is about rational form, albeit a form we are inescapably bound, logic is contentless. Truth would appear bigger than logic, much like claims to existence of god are of infinite seeming complexity. I see this logic hang up being glazed over for other concerns....

I would like Sandro to come back and tease out any clarity/confusion thus far.

[Burning ghost]

This is a nice little analogy:

From plato.stanford.edu/entries/skepticism/# ... keVsOrdInc

To clarify the distinction between ordinary incredulity and philosophical doubt, let us consider two movies: The Truman Show and The Matrix. In the former, Truman is placed, without his knowledge, in a contrived environment so that his “life” can be broadcast on television. But he begins to wonder whether the world surrounding him is, in fact, what it appears to be. Some events seem to happen too regularly and many other things are just not quite as they should be. Eventually, Truman obtains convincing evidence that all his world is a stage and all the men and women are merely players. The crucial point is that even had he not developed any doubts, there is, in principle, a way to resolve them had they arisen. Such doubts, though quite general, are examples of ordinary incredulity.

Contrast this with the deception depicted in The Matrix. When everything is running as programmed by the machines, there is no possible way for the “people” in the matrix to determine that the world as experienced is only a “dream world” and not the real world (the world of causes and effects). The only “reality” that it is possible to investigate is a computer generated one. (See Irwin 2002, 2005 for collections of articles on The Matrix.)

The Truman Show is a depiction of a case of ordinary incredulity because there is some evidence that is, in principle, available to Truman for determining what's really the case; whereas The Matrix depicts a situation similar to that imagined by a typical philosophical skeptic in which it is not possible for the Matrix-bound characters to obtain evidence for determining that things are not as they seem (whenever the virtual reality is perfectly created). Put another way, the philosophical skeptic challenges our ordinary assumption that there is evidence available that can help us to discriminate between the real world and some counterfeit world that appears in all ways to be identical to the real world. Ordinary incredulity arises within the context of other propositions of a similar sort taken to be known, and, in principle, the doubt can be removed by discovering the truth of some further proposition of the relevant type. On the other hand, philosophical skepticism about a proposition of a certain type derives from considerations that are such that they cannot be removed by appealing to additional propositions of that type—or so the skeptic claims.

Of course in day-to-day chat I may just as well interchange the two terms without a moments thought. In philosophy though there is more precision. For me, in philosophical terms, I don't say "doubt" in the same way I say "skepticism".

This fascinates me in general because it brings to the fore the problem of the "question" and how we approach it. To doubt is to question in a general way. I guess skepticism could be called a kind of reductionism because we pick apart the items that define what we are talking about.

In short the above quote frames "doubt" as being "skeptical doubt" only if no truth is decided upon. The skeptic continues to unearth more and more questions rather than accept any given "truth". Some extremists in this light would even refuse to accept the idea of anything being "true". I would not really go this far because I regard truth as being a mechanism of language ... BUT I could understand the thought of continuing down that path by supposing that "skepticism" can exist in some primitive pre-language form (although that makes less and less sense to me, hence I stop wandering off into those mystical realms if I don't have something worthy enough to guide me back out again. Imagination has its uses and its faults.

-- Updated July 29th, 2017, 5:13 pm to add the following --

I don't think "infinitely complex" means anything. It looks like it means something, but looks can be deceiving.

[-1-]

You're right, I agree, Burning Ghost, that the two words have diverging sub-meanings.This is exacerbated by the idiomatic usage of them: I doubt it, I have my doubts about it, I have serious doubts about it, I doubt that ..., and: I'm skeptical, I am sceptical (if you compare me to the waterless water closet), I view this with skepticism, I am a skeptic, I am a Skeptic, etc.

So there is a lot of overlap, and a lot of outerlap.

To me infinitely complex means something that is infinite in expanse, and has no recurring parts, and not one part is similar or the same as another, in appearance, structure or function. Any finite body is not infinitely complex.

Can an idea be infinitely complex? Or a set of ideas form infinite complexity? Well, I don't know. Ideas are most often reflections of reality, and sometimes ideas are built on other ideas based on reality. Reality is always more complex (made up of non-repeating parts) than the ideas they generate. And an object made on the model of an idea is always more complex than the idea itself. So if any finite object is the basis of the idea, and the fininte object can't be infinitely complex, then the idea can't be infinitely complex. If an idea can be formed of an infinitely complex thing, then the idea has a chance to be infinitely complex, but that is not possible for the human mind to achieve.

Can a mind based on a finite calculator like the brain, which has its spacial limitations, create an infinitely complex idea? No. So the idea, if it is to be infinitely complex, has to be generated by an infinitely large brain. Whether such one exists or not, is not my call.

[Ranvier]

Words have meaning based on the underlying subjective interpretation of a concept. We may have universal definition of a word and people still will present with different understanding of such meaning. This is why it's wise to define words in context of such meaning.
Doubt - implies rejection of premise but doesn't state premise to be untrue with certainty.
Skepticism - is a method of thought that dictates caution in taking what is presented at face value, derived from experience in understanding that there are many perceptions of the same reality only as relative truth. Skeptic accepts the premise but understands other possibilities to always exist.