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

[NickGaspar]

Yes, those are tautologies that are always true, I don't see a contradiction (?)

Sure. Those are tautologies. In essence they are descriptions based on our direct observations. There aren't any contradictions in tautologies, but that was never my point! I was pointing out that we don't need an "eternal'' mind to come up with those observations, We have a capable sensory system that interacts with the empirical world and reason to evaluate the quality of those claims!

The factual evidence is available but not the justification for it.

Our descriptions of factual evidence is what renders those Truths eternal, since those facts make a claim to be sound and always true (as long those facts are fundamental). There is not reason to assume an extra entity on top of a Necessary and Sufficient cause.

I cannot agree. Mere recognition of a fact and the explanation of it are two different things. We can observe that 2 + 2 = 4 but we cannot explain why we exist in a world where this is true.

Well I see two problems in your statement. First of all we can explain why 2+2=4. 2 and 4 are nothing more than descriptive symbols of things in nature, which can also be used in an abstract way.( that means without linking quantity to a specific entity!).
eg. Having II entities of apples,oranges,kiwis, grapes etc. and bringing II more entities of the same kind we always end up with this physical summation of IIII entities. For practical reasons we decided to symbolize those summations with the symbol of 2 and 4. Now we can use those symbols, as I said, independent of any actual entity and still make calculations (abstract concept).
Secondly I can not see how a "why" question is relevant to this phenomenon! Generally "why" questions tend to be useless questions or unanswerable or pointing to subjective answers.
"Why jumping electrons produce photons","why the oxygen molecule when interacting with photons produces blue color (our sky)"why we exist" etc. Those are fallacious questions (begging the question, introducing teleology) without any objective epistemic value or answer.

So, going back to 2+2=4, this is how physical entities "work" in our world when we bring them together (add) or take them apart (subtract) . SO our symbols' job is to describe a really simple property of entities (quantity) and we can use these descriptive relations in an abstract way. There is nothing there which demands an external "agent" than us as observers.

:This is based on an assumption that Leibniz, Plato, et. al., would not accept, which is that consciousness itself is contingent. You imply that when you mention physical brains (empiricists believe that consciousness is an epiphenomenon of physical brains). Leibniz and others propose that Consciousness is primary, or that both Consciousness and Matter are primary and interdependent, but not derivative or contingent on one another

Well its more of a Pragmatic Necessity than an assumption(limits of our observations). I am sure that Leibniz and Plato etc wouldn't agree but their ideas,even if they are far older, have zero descriptive or predictive power or any instrumental value(e.g. Idealistic concepts don't explain why split brain patients hold simultaneously conflicting positions, or why specific injuries/pathology affect specific mind properties, or why different drugs affect or improve consciousness states etc etc).
I don't claim that they are wrong, but again, their additional assumptions offer nothing to the "table of ideas" specially when we already have a Necessary and Sufficient causal explanation about this phenomenon (conscious states) and when idealistic principles have a long bad record of their contributions in our epistemology!

TO be honest I don't know what empiricists believe but I am a Methodological Naturalist and I can only accept what our current observations show us to be the case. Our conscious states are not an epiphenomenon, but an actual NCC phenomenon. e.g. Since 2017 we do have the technology to " identify" with great precision the content of our conscious thoughts by just reading fMRI brain scans. (Jing Wang, Vladimir L. Cherkassky, and Marcel Adam Just*Center for Cognitive Brain Imaging, Psychology Department, Carnegie Mellon University,Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania).
We know that the Brain displays Strong Correlations to the emergence of the phenomenon of conscious states and that its not an just an epiphenomenon.

IF we use logic to analyze the claim "consciousness" is primary , then we can easily identify a really serious contradiction in relation to the actual meaning of the word!
"To be conscious is to be aware (of something.) One can not be aware without something to be aware of. In other words, a consciousness without anything to be conscious of is not a consciousness. Nor can a consciousness be aware of itself and claim to be independent of existence, because if a consciousness is aware of itself, then it must itself exist and be an existent. "

So Existence must be primary and as I stated before, from pragmatic necessity we need to limit our selves to our observations and to focus on the role of the brain for all mind Properties (not only consciousness which is only the third most important mind property, according to cognitive science).
We can not accept the claim that "both Consciousness and Matter are primary and interdependent," because our direct observations not only fail to confirm that assumption,they also point to the contingency of all mind properties to a specific biological structure, the human brain. This is what we realize through our conscious states.

Again Plato and Leibniz could be right, but we don't have the observations to back up their claim and as I said, their principles have never provided us with a claim with proven epistemic or instrumental value, plus their ideas is unfalsifiable, so its not "even wrong.

[Pantagruel]

Having a logical argument for god explicitly contradicts the role of faith, which is central to most theistic religions.

Pragmatically speaking, the belief or non-belief in God is measured in terms of the difference that belief makes in the actions of the believer. So it doesn't really matter "why" you believe God exists, only the impact that belief has on your behaviour.

So energy spent constructing a rational proof of God's existence is kind of time-wasted.....from a pragmatic perspective.

[NickGaspar]

Are you conflating eternal and everlasting?
No and this is why I included the defintion I use for eternal "truth"
(""eternal truth is an entity or a proposition that is true with no relation to time. That is, it is true, not only always, but always with absolute necessity.")
Whether is everlasting it only has to do with the quality of our facts we use to come up with an eternal truth.
e.g. "2 + 2 = 4" this is an eternal and everlasting since it is a description based on our logical absolutes.
" it lives, it dies." we don't have 100% knowledge to claim something like that. It could easily be a black swan fallacy, plus we need to define the word "live". eg. we have a concept of God, is it a living entity? does it die?

Regarding Chaos Theory. Chaos Theory explains how determinism does not imply prediction.

Sure I agree with that statement, but I was only trying to point out that order and chaos are not presumptions of reality but observer relative qualities of this process we call reality. They are labels describing different aspects of a process.

I and many if not most people do need to trust a model of Truth and Reality . Most people don't represent those by way of words or images.

Again I will agree with what people need, but their needs say nothing about how we come up with our concepts or how we use them.
The fact is that all our concepts are inspired by our empirical observations on natural processes/phenomena and our symbolic thinking gets mixed up and tends to produce idealistic entities when they Unnecessary and Insufficient since we do have a capable explanation.
We don't need an "external" source for our tautologies which we identified as Eternal Truths. This claim has a burden that needs to be met.

[NickGaspar]

Having a logical argument for god explicitly contradicts the role of faith, which is central to most theistic religions.

Pragmatically speaking, the belief or non-belief in God is measured in terms of the difference that belief makes in the actions of the believer. So it doesn't really matter "why" you believe God exists, only the impact that belief has on your behavior.

So energy spent constructing a rational proof of God's existence is kind of time-wasted.....from a pragmatic perspective.

Faith has to do with traditional religions and their claims about this concept.
Deism has a different approach on the concept of God. I present a definition.
" Deists believe in one God, but not on the basis of faith and supernatural revelation, but on the evidence of reason."
I can argue that they totally fail to do so but they are free to try.
My objection though is that this subject is justified only from theological aspect, not a philosophical one!
Philosophy is all about knowledge and the production of wise propositions . Theism have never managed to demonstrate its epistemic potential or value and it has been there for couple of thousand of years!

[Belindi]

1. There are necessary truths.
2. These necessary truths are necessary because they cannot be any other way.
3. Their truth is thusly not dependent on contingent existents with regards either to disagreement about the truth of those statements or any conscious contingent beings existence.
a. The truth of necessary statements are not dependent on material or physical reality.
_______________________________________________________________________________
--> Their necessary truth must be grounded in a mind or intellect because they exist separate from material reality but cannot exist ontologically on their own.

I read some Spinoza recently, and he distinguished intellect from imagination in a way that might explain how this argument is meant to be interpreted? I'm not certain I understood him correctly, but, at least I will offer my interpretation as it may make sense of your argument.

Spinoza seemed to think of imagination as the impressions experienced in our consciousness as a result of the movements in our body[/brain]. (Those movements are in turn caused by external movements, via the sensory organs, or internal movements having to do with the structure of the body/brain.)

On the other hand, intellect was the fact itself, regardless of whether or not it was being observed, thought about, physically manifest, or consciously experienced.

If the original argument is trying to defend the existence of some kind of mind which independently imagines, feels, thinks, acts, manifests, etc, then I don't see how that makes any sense. How does the existence of the necessary truths require that type of a mind to think them?

On the other hand, if we are only stating something along the lines of: "God is the set of all intellectual facts," then perhaps that could make sense.

What is your interlocutor trying to use this argument to prove? A god whose nature actually follows from the argument, or some other god whom they are only hoping to defend with this argument?

I think the difference between imagination and intellect may be modernised by modern psychology as the difference between reactive thoughts and thoughts that have been refined and enlarged by reflection. Or the difference between imagination and intellect may be modernised by modern neuroscience as the difference between emotions and feelings.

Spinoza thought all that happens necessarily happens, including fantasies and 'imagination'.However man is the more free the more he employs knowledge and reason.

[Felix]

NickGaspar: Secondly I can not see how a "why" question is relevant to this phenomenon! Generally "why" questions tend to be useless questions or unanswerable or pointing to subjective answers.

It's unanswerable by the human mind, that is the point. Why the constants of the Universe are fine tuned so as to make everything in it possible, including life and intelligent creatures who can recognize so-called eternal truths.

We already have a Necessary and Sufficient causal explanation about this phenomenon (conscious states)

I must have missed the ground-breaking Nobel prize announcement! As far as I know, we cannot explain consciousness or how it became manifest, only describe it's physical operations.

NickGaspar: Nor can a consciousness be aware of itself and claim to be independent of existence, because if a consciousness is aware of itself, then it must itself exist and be an existent.

That would be true of contingent forms of intelligence but it would not apply to eternal, noncontingent intelligence or mind and there is no reason to presume that we would be capable of apprehending and comprehending such an Intelligence.

NickGaspar: We can not accept the claim that "both Consciousness and Matter are primary and interdependent," because our direct observations not only fail to confirm that assumption, they also point to the contingency of all mind properties to a specific biological structure, the human brain.

They also point to the contingency of all mind properties to a specific biological structure, the human brain. Again Plato and Leibniz could be right, but we don't have the observations to back up their claim and as I said, their principles have never provided us with a claim with proven epistemic or instrumental value, plus their ideas is unfalsifiable, so its not "even wrong.

Again, you are speaking of temporal and contingent intelligence, which, being contingent and insular, can only comprehend phenomenal facts, not eternal truths.

[NickGaspar]

It's unanswerable by the human mind, that is the point. Why the constants of the Universe are fine tuned so as to make everything in it possible, including life and intelligent creatures who can recognize so-called eternal truths.

Sure but as I showed through my examples, not all sentences qualify as useful or meaningful questions... just because we decided to apply a "why"at the begging and a question-mark at the end of their structure."Why" questions tend to introduce assumptions which a. we can not demonstrate to be real (begging the question fallacy) and b. Teleological assumptions have a really bad record in their contribution efforts to our epistemology. The fact that we have validated zero(0) claims based on teleological principles explain why we don't do Science/Philosophy on Aristotelian principles any more.

Don't get me wrong, I don't believe that teleological assumptions are wrong, my principles of Methodological Naturalism do not allow me to reach beyond my observations. I am only pointing out that those "questions" which pose as "eternal truths" are based on fallacious logical foundations.
So they are not wrong,they are irrational to be accepted as truths.

Now Unanswerable to the human mind means ... unanswerable to the only type of mind we are aware of. YEs we are in a universe that has really limited fine tuned pockets for life. The remarkable thing to talk about would be if we existed in a universe which was not fined tuned to host small samples of intelligent life in comparison of its vastness. How amazing that would be right! So because it is capable to include intelligent life, this is why intelligent life exist and has conversations about it.
Are you familiar with Douglas Adams's idea of the "sentient puddle" fallacy? It goes like this. A "sentient" water occupying a pothole has a monologue on how wise this hole on the ground is"designed" in order to fit it perfectly. The observable truth is that puddles and human beings evolve specifically according to those "potholes" found in our universe not the other way around...

I must have missed the ground-breaking Nobel prize announcement! As far as I know, we cannot explain consciousness or how it became manifest, only describe it's physical operations.

Well we didn't have an announcement because the answers we have available about this phenomenon are not what most people expect! They are not about a "discovery" but about a descriptive framework based on accumulated findings and much more time is needed for a proper documentation. e.g. the search of the Higgs Boson started back in the 60's and its discovery was announced in our decade and after thousands of data producing particle crashes in Cern!In Higgs case we only talking about a fundamental particle, not an emergent property by a complex biological structure! So our documentation has still ground to cover but the benefits in real life from this working hypothesis are starting to show.
In the field of cognitive science and neuroscience,we have a sufficient and necessary framework to describe the emergence of conscious states.
The NCC, the Ascending Reticular Activating System(ARAS), our technical applications (Medical, diagnostics etc), fMRI reading techniques all support Strong Correlations between brain functions and conscious states.
Additionally Nobelist Frank Wilczek's Core Theory doesn't leave room for any extra forces, fields or particles to interacts with matter (thus our brains) without us NOT been able to observe them, so this renders the case on the hypothesis of "consciousness as fundamental" pretty weak! In order to accept such hypothesis, it will mean to get rid all our particle physics, our standard model and that would not be wise.

Again I must be clear! I am not in a position to exclude any claims about the ontology of consciousness as wrong! Not at all. I am only saying that those ideas are not in competition with our scientific understanding or science's current frameworks. In science we don't produce explanations for invisible underlying ontologies. In Science we only have Descriptive Frameworks which identity observable mechanisms as Necessary and Sufficient to cause a phenomenon. Sure beyond those observable mechanisms we can speculate on whatever we want, but the moment to accept them or to challenge the causal role of those mechanism is only AFTER we have the evidence to do so.
Current idealistic ideas about consciousness go beyond every observation we have, do not address our observations or Strong Correlations at all and they do make any constitutions to our understanding or our applied technology. They are unfalsifiable (Metaphysics on non scientific principles)and their suspicious connections to the rest of our Death Denying Ideologies (described by Ernest Becker's in his Terror Management Theory and validated by Sheldon Solomon) should make us skeptical before we accept such metaphysical speculations.
So again I don't think that those ideas are wrong, but they are demonstrably irrational to be accept even as possible.

That would be true of contingent forms of intelligence but it would not apply to eternal, noncontingent intelligence or mind and there is no reason to presume that we would be capable of apprehending and comprehending such an Intelligence.

I am not sure how you can prove that statement plus you are introducing what we need to prove as a presumption to your hypothesis! The contradiction of the claim "consciousness is primary" rises directly from the actual definition of what means to be conscious!
Now here is a more important problem with this idea( in an epistemic aspect). We used to "create" invisible substances with identical properties as fundamental to those properties displayed by specific phenomenon in nature! Phlogiston, Miasma, Orgone Energy, luminifurous Aether, Panacea,Caloric, Odic force, Nrays etc etc were some of our discredited attempts to lazily speculate about the causes of things in nature by just assuming a fundamental substance. We don't do that in science and in philosophy any more though! We learned our lesson, specially in the case of Phlogiston which delayed our advances in Chemistry and Particle physics for hundreds of years!
So how this idea of "consciousness" could be different and why should we accepted it without any existential indications/evidence (based only on a observation gap argument!)specially when our intellectual history is 100% against such type of approaches ?

Again, you are speaking of temporal and contingent intelligence, which, being contingent and insular, can only comprehend phenomenal facts, not eternal truths.

Sure I am only speaking about what we can be sure it exists and can be verified! Our intelligence is limited to the nature of our observations. We can speculate on eternal truths and never be sure about the truth value of those claims. We can only be sure about our trivial tautologies (deduction) for their eternal true nature, but eternal truths are not "created" by a idealistic mind , scattered in the "ether" for us to find them.
Eternal and Absolute truths are our "ideal goals" in knowledge that we struggle to invent...not actual "statements" set there by a floating mind, to be discovered.
We discover facts but we invent mental tools to describe them.(ideas, claims/propositions eg. Newton Calculus).

In my opinion that is a classic "mixing the planned route on a Map with the actual landscape of the place" fallacy.
We can plot our route on the map to reach a specific position on the map, but that doesn't mean that ..."someone" created that specific route waiting for us to follow.
We discover actual physical elements by reading our map, but we invent the best route for us by comparing the characteristics of different possible routes to our needs and preferences (e.g. avoid elevation or rough terrain,find water springs or food, avoid forests etc). If we follow that pre planned route, that doen't mean that it will be highlighted on the actual ground, or that it was the best choice we could make. There will be always things that a map (our observations) ignore.
Now by substituting the "route" with "claim" I guess you will easily spot the problem with absolute/eternal truths.
So our routes(or claims) are as good as our available observations and talking about absolute truth is a red herring from the perspective of logic.

[Thomyum2]

Having a logical argument for god explicitly contradicts the role of faith, which is central to most theistic religions.

Pragmatically speaking, the belief or non-belief in God is measured in terms of the difference that belief makes in the actions of the believer. So it doesn't really matter "why" you believe God exists, only the impact that belief has on your behaviour.

So energy spent constructing a rational proof of God's existence is kind of time-wasted.....from a pragmatic perspective.

Yes, my thoughts exactly. 'Faith' is something entirely differently from belief. It's a conscious decision or choice made by one's will; it's often described as a 'gift' - something that is offered or accepted freely and unconditionally, an act of trust. As it is written in Christian scripture: Because you have seen me, you have believed; blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed. So while our beliefs might be dependent on or swayed by evidence or proof, faith cannot be. The logical argument for the existence of god, while perhaps an interesting intellectual or philosophical exercise, from the standpoint of arriving at or understanding faith itself, is just as you've said - contradictory.

[Belindi]

But it does matter why you believe in God. You may believe in God because you want to foist your responsibility and error on to God. Or because you think God will sort out human error despite human folly.These are high risk attitudes which risk not only the believer's safety but also the safety of others.

[Pantagruel]

But it does matter why you believe in God. You may believe in God because you want to foist your responsibility and error on to God. Or because you think God will sort out human error despite human folly.These are high risk attitudes which risk not only the believer's safety but also the safety of others.

Yes, you can believe for different reasons. But as I said, from a pragmatic standpoint (by definition) the belief exists exactly to the extent of its practical effects, which in this case would be our actions. Hence, whatever your putative reasons for believing, they will be instantiated by whatever actions are in fact driven or guided by that belief.

[Belindi]

Mark 9.24: And straightway the father of the child cried out, and said with tears, Lord, I believe; help thou mine unbelief.

Isn't it a psychological fact that nobody would get out of bed in the morning unless they had faith something was worth doing? If actions precede beliefs the subject may have been indoctrinated, 'brainwashed'.

Quality beliefs are those that have been examined and filtered through reason.It was reasonable for the father of the child in the parable to have faith in the healing powers of Jesus because the healing powers of holy men was a prevailing belief at the time, which in the absence of modern medicine worked better than no therapy.

[Pantagruel]

Textbook definition of pramatism:
meaning of a proposition is to be found in the practical consequences of accepting it

So what you are saying may be true, but what I am saying is by definition true from a pragmatic perspective, which was all that I was pointing out.

[Felix]

I've never met anyone who believes in God for practical reasons.

[Pantagruel]

In this context practical means actual, not any other connotation. So presumably everyone who believes in God would concur that that belief should, in relevant ways, shape their behaviours......

[Belindi]

Felix wrote:

I've never met anyone who believes in God for practical reasons.

But I expect you will have met people who trust in God for practical reasons.

E.g. I believe in sea air.
I believe in my clever daughter.
I believe in you my Darling!