Creation or Evoloution? Big Bang or Big Belief -- which is it?

[Lydiot]

@Lydiot,

It's very late to launch into a comprehensive examination of what KL-666 has been arguing for.

Just to add:

You can spend as much time as you want at "forums.philosophyforums.com" and see people talk about this in what appears to be an infinity of time. None of this "realness of reality" is new. Not much of it is particularly productive or interesting,

for example: http://forums.philosophyforums.com/thre ... 16572.html

[KL-666]

Oh come on, Lydiot. In about every sentence both of you have written, you say how wonderfully real the whole construct of science is. You can tell that reality is real, because of successful observations and calculations inside reality. On that i say: Wait a minute, it does not work that way with me. One can not prove the realness of reality from within, and from without there is no proof either.

You yourself have pushed me out of a discussion within reality (Hubble, Arp, etc...) to a discussion outside it. At that point i realize that we should not mix the two, and immediately say that i had better not discussed things within reality. That can only cause confusion.

Yet you go on and on accusing me of mixing arguments from the two discussions. If anyone is playing word games here, it is you.

Kind regards, Vincent

[Lydiot]

Oh come on, Lydiot. In about every sentence both of you have written, you say how wonderfully real the whole construct of science is. You can tell that reality is real, because of successful observations and calculations inside reality. On that i say: Wait a minute, it does not work that way with me. One can not prove the realness of reality from within, and from without there is no proof either.

The above appears to me to essentially just say that nothing can be proven, period. As such, of what value is that statement?

You can't prove a tree. You can't prove a post. You can't prove a hypothesis. You can't prove anything. So?....

You yourself have pushed me out of a discussion within reality (Hubble, Arp, etc...) to a discussion outside it. At that point i realize that we should not mix the two, and immediately say that i had better not discussed things within reality. That can only cause confusion.

Yet you go on and on accusing me of mixing arguments from the two discussions. If anyone is playing word games here, it is you.

Kind regards, Vincent

But was your response to me asking about the video not about the "realness of reality"? The video was about science. How is that not applying one domain over the other?

[SkyBoat]

@Everyone,

All right, for the moment, I concede that Vincent's universe, based on the Cartesian model, is the best definition of reality that can be perceived. And with it is the epistemological reality that truth is relative to the perceiver. In this reality my being should be close to some mean of existence. Why, then, do I feel pain and have the perception of suffering as a result of that pain? What is the function of pain and suffering in the universe based on the Cartesian model of reality because there is a lot of it going around? The second question is, what is the meaning of death in this model of the universe? I ask this because as a sentient being, establishing the meaning of death has a great deal to do with understanding the meaning of life, ergo, what does it mean to be human?

When Descartes wrote Cogito ergo sum he wasn't kidding. He expected his readers to follow through and work through the implications of that construct, which is, in one respect, an ultimate statement of what it means to be human. Therefore, what I wrote in the above paragraph are the logical extensions of his statement. Human suffering is rampant in the world. How does "I think, therefore I am" inform us about the nature of suffering in our quest to understand what it means to be human?

But I also found this quote by Isaac Asimov (I am a great fan of his) that explains my perspective on reality:

“I believe in evidence. I believe in observation, measurement, and reasoning, confirmed by independent observers. I'll believe anything, no matter how wild and ridiculous, if there is evidence for it. The wilder and more ridiculous something is, however, the firmer and more solid the evidence will have to be.”
― Isaac Asimov, The Roving Mind

I think I could happily claim I am an Asimovian, even though he was very much an athiest, but an honest one, not hostile. For instance:

“I am an atheist, out and out. It took me a long time to say it. I've been an atheist for years and years, but somehow I felt it was intellectually unrespectable to say one was an atheist, because it assumed knowledge that one didn't have. Somehow, it was better to say one was a humanist or an agnostic. I finally decided that I'm a creature of emotion as well as of reason. Emotionally, I am an atheist. I don't have the evidence to prove that God doesn't exist, but I so strongly suspect he doesn't that I don't want to waste my time.”
― Isaac Asimov

Isaac Asimov's voluminous Robot series beginning with his immortal, I, Robot (The movie is a mish-mash of the stories in the book, though it somehow manages to salvage the underlying theme of the original) is a journey into the the psychological pathways of exploring what it means to be human. That is why I ask it above of the Cartesians. I have been reading Asimov all my life exploring the idea. I also have been, as a person of Christian faith, exploring the idea. What I am hoping to find out is what is the Cartesian anthropology for the idea of suffering, because the issue of suffering is really the unique human question. Animals live their lives as creatures in a niche in the food chain. They either survive or get eaten. We have no idea if they have the capacity to anticipate suffering in the way humans do. In certain species such as the apes, dolphins, dogs, elephants and other higher mammalian species we know they can mourn the loss of a member of their group, but do we know if they have the human capacity to assign meaning to the loss in the way our brain allow us?

To end, Isaac, with his wit, took a popular camp song, one I sang many times around the campfire growing up and, shall we say, he deconstructed it into a delightful lesson in science that makes me giggle every time I read it: (And he even keeps the meter correct, so if you know the tune, you can sing his verse!)

“Tell me why the stars do shine,
Tell me why the ivy twines,
Tell me what makes skies so blue,
And I'll tell you why I love you.

Nuclear fusion makes stars to shine,
Tropisms make the ivy twine,
Raleigh scattering make skies so blue,
Testicular hormones are why I love you. ”
― Isaac Asimov

[KL-666]

Hello Skyboat,

I thought we were talking about the relationship between the consciousness and reality. Therefore i focused on that. By doing so i did not want to exclude consciousnesses of pain, happiness, dreams, etc... I hope this is a small misunderstanding. Else i have missed something crucial, i did not think of yet.

I know i am very different in death related to religion. I can not know what is there, and have to live with: probably it is the end of it, i am no more. But that does not exclude that a being that still is, can have consciousnesses of mourning.

Continuing on the word consciousness may sound a bit cold. The use of it is meant to stay consequent. But technically i see no difference in emotions, etc... between the consciousness i use, and the psychological being that lives within reality.

[edit]
Thinking of it, the only really big difference between the two i see, is the relationship between the consciousness and reality.
[/edit]

So hopefully we are not that far apart as it seems to me now.

Kind regards, Vincent

[IAHM-COL]

Nuclear fusion makes stars to shine,

Agreed,

Tropisms make the ivy twine,

Agreed.

Raleigh scattering make skies so blue,

Certainly agreed

Testicular hormones are why I love you. ”

Really? Which one. IIRC, there are 3 produced: Testosterone (the infamous), 17-beta-estradiol (yup, ladies, we also make this one... worry not you also make the testosterone), and Inhibin. So far I can figure out a way these hormones are linked to affection or "love". Maybe, arguably in the "masculine" type --or vigor--, if we ignore the fact that castrati were not "in-functional" . How bout we switch gears to Dopamine, serotonine, norephinephrine, and --in the masculine sense-- Nitric Oxide, who may be more strictly related to "love" in all its forms?

So I suggest, Mr. Asimov to edit


and, neurotransmitters are why you Love me."

[IAHM-COL]

an interesting assay, and potentially a fun read for those interested in the black hole of this thread

http://www3.nd.edu/~achakra1/downloads/glanzberg_handbook.pdf

IH-COL

[SkyBoat]

Vincent-- Asimov was having a bit of fun from the male perspective in the verse, hence the reference to the testicular hormones. So, he didn't mean it to be taken too seriously, rather to poke fun at a simple camp song, all in good fun.

As for my comments about the next steps, that is the thing about living. You can, I suppose sit in the bliss of your philosophical position until you can't. Or you can choose to sit in the bliss of your philosophical position regardless of any physical change you may experience that we commonly call pain. Suffering is an assignment of meaning. I worked for nearly two decades in this context often with people who one day were in a perfectly "normal" state of being and health with no physical complaints or pain, and in an instant all of that changed. It is not something I can easily dismiss, when it was the major topic of discussion every day when I went to work. And it also was my job to help them find a way to cope with that change. In Oregon where I live, many people do not believe very strongly in God, they believe in a sense of the Divine, but have little urge to have any organizational contact with those you would call religious. The phrase, "I'm spiritual but not religious" was the most common one I heard. Often, though, we soon were actually involved in a conversation of their choice that was far more religious than they had intended. When facing major life changing conditions, persons of a spiritual nature, in my experience, gravitate toward a more openly religious faith. I don't remember anyone ever moving in the other direction, although I know of individuals who were for some reason in their personal background, angry at God before the medical event, who became even more angry and more agitated in their attitude toward anything religious. To a person, these individuals were impossible to find a access point in their defenses to be able to start to defuse their anger and help them begin to process the intensity of the feelings of grief and whatever else they had been carrying sometime for decades. Their anger was beyond burning; it had become seething. They were the ones I felt the greatest pain for, for in their seething, they were letting their anger, like a cancer eat them up bit by bit, almost cell by cell, from the inside. I feared many of them would not meet a happy end, were it to be by suicide--either intentionally or unintentionally--and there are far more ways to unintentionally commit suicide by the latter method than the former.

I bring this up only because there is this idea that life is like sitting on a continuum from, say happy to sad or any other metric. I disagree. I think life is more like sitting on top of an artist's palette and life is constantly squirting new colors at you, which are always very slick and there are very few hand-holds and the colors are always combining and just when you get in one part of the palette a set of colors you like, a new tube suddenly looms overhead and a bunch of a new color you don't even like is squirted all over your very pretty region of color. You can't talk about philosophy in the abstract for more than just a few moments before life in all its chromatic messiness comes in like a 3-D Rainbow tsunami and messes everything up. So you constantly have to be re-calibrating what you think truth is and what you think reality is and what the realness of the real is because you only have a few moments to contemplate it before the next wave rolls in, maybe rolling you in, or rolling over you and leaving you on a beach of a whole new color. As a Cartesian, I suppose, you look at that and go, well, that is as normal as normal can ever possibly be. For me as a rationalist and a Lockian, I look at the sandy mess I'm standing in and say, "There's got to be a better way to exist than just getting hit by these polychromatic waves over and over, so I'm go to look for some basic solution (i.e. truth) about their cycle and figure out a way to build a wall so I can live on one side of the wall and the waves can crash on the other, and I can stop being toss around every time one of those things hit the beach." Now, as a Nederlander, who probably lives below sea-level, I would think this makes at lease a modicum of sense to you. And since both philosophy and cosmology are often both built on thought experiments, I thought this would be a good one for us to ponder for a while.

All of it, comes back to that basic question: What does it mean to be human?

[SkyBoat]

@IAHM-COL-- Thanks for the essay. It will be an interesting read, I'm sure.

[KL-666]

Hello Skyboat,

The picture you paint of Cartesians that they should be inert is not correct. I might say it is quite the opposite. You can find Cartesians among dedicated doctors, astronomers, programmers and everywhere else. The major difference between the Lockians and the Cartesians would be their motivation. Lockians do things out of necessity, they must do things. Cartesians do things out of choice, they want to do things. There are several aspects in which i would prefer the Cartesian.

Psychology

The Lockian is constantly victim of bad things from the outside, which he feels he must correct. Resulting in a very negative person that constantly complains about the bad from the outside. This is not good for his own health either.

The Cartesian is much more tolerant to things that happen. The things he corrects he does because he wants to. Resulting in a happier and more agreeable person.

Responsibility

If something goes wrong the Cartesion will say firmly "I did it". The lockian says "I can't help it, something bad came from the outside".

Dedication

Doing things because it must be done is not very motivating to do it perfect. Good is good enough. If you do something because you want to, then it is your own project and you want to do it as good as possible, even if nobody ever sees the result.

I have noticed it in my work, where the more Lockian-like people that feel they must go to work, deliver programs with the most bugs. They blame the computer for the bad things happening to their program. Where the more Cartesian-like people that feel they want to go to work, test their own programming to the bone before they deliver it. They blame themselves if anything is wrong.

Progress

A Cartesian astronomer is open to change of theory when observations make it necessary. A Lockian astronomer will be much more reluctant to accept such change, because then the whole reality he lives in changes. So the Lockian holds the brake on progress.


I really do not want to do these debates of this is better than that. If we both do not have preconceptions about the other stance in life, such debates are not necessary.

Kind regards, Vincent