No real meaning to you, I assert, but meaning to some others. Perhaps you simply fail to understand the meaning of the concept in other people's minds, in addition to finding it contradictory to your metaphysics and view of the universe. A falsehood or hypothetical can be conceptualized and have real meaning, while still being contradictory or invalid. Perhaps you have mistaken such a contradiction as one inherent to the concept itself, via intrinsic interpretation of concepts, when in reality your conceptualization simply has not grasped the actual concept in the mind of your fellow philosopher.
Discussion
This is not to say that interpretations of God are never used as a kind of anti-concept to stifle intellectual engagement and rational self interest. Fallacious conceptualizations of gods are used for that all the time. Like the anti-concept of the benevolent state or the freedom of democracy. It is evil, and I agree wholeheartedly on that.
No, I don’t think that the word “god” has any definable meaning in terms of objective physical reality.
But let me ask, if you think that a “god” exists, can you name any possible evidence which would falsify that belief for you?
My suspicion is that this is a non-falisfiable belief, as it is for most people, and so there is no such identifiable evidence. Most people say you just have to “have faith” in such things.
The problem is that you are using the physical method to study a metaphysical concept. Physics and metaphysics are two different sciences with two different methods. Since metaphysics is poorly understood, people tend to think of it as a free for all, specially because modern philosophy started to treat it like that. But it has a strict deductive and intuitive (intuition in a proper gnosiological sense) method of its own. Plato started it and Aristotle lapidated it. Throughout western history this tradition was strong until the enlightenment rejected it
Well if the belief is non-falsifiable, then I have no interest in discussing it and think of it as basically gibberish with no referents to reality.
Being non falsifiable is a concept used for physical / natural theories. Falsiability is a non falsifiable concept because it is a metaphisical proposition about physical science. Why should all knowledge be falsifiable? What experiment could be done the falsify the falsiability theory?
It is true that the existence of existence to which thoughts and concepts properly refer is logically axiomatic as identified by Aristotle. Essentially one cannot proceed with anything without assuming “A is A”. For example, our discussion here is meaningless without assuming that.
Yes. And these axioms are not just assumed for the sake of argument, they are known through the intellect, by intellectual intuition or intellectual perception. And since they are self evident, they cannot be deduced from other axioms prior to them nore denied without creating paradoxes and problems in all the rest of the sciences
Well I would say that they cannot be denied, but rather than not being deduced from any other things, I would say there may be equivalent formulations that one person innately beholds that another person does not. A is A could be formulated as A->B; B->A; B
This B might correspond to a specific concept beheld explicitly by some but not others, while still never contradicting that A is A. Knowledge of B might be innate, or due to prior reasoning, or for whatever reason that you know something B is true if and only if A is true.
This is the fundamental reason for the rejection of God by many Objectivists, I think. They forget about logical equivalencies and then ignore the concepts in other people's minds that sound wrong to them that they don't personally KNOW about. Existence is assumed and logic is assumed, excellent starting points, except they start with a very specific definition of existence, and they refuse from that moment on to acknowledge that certain Bs could exist for all they know. No offense. I just think it is an actual fallacy at play wherein you ignore interpretations other than your own, via starting your entire philosophy from a convenient definition that hides the boogeyman, then using justifications for it when arguing about it that apply only to your particular definition of your axiomatic claim.
In other, less precise words, Objectivists simply have faith that there is no God and then tell themselves that it's because they believe in logic, as if it were deducible from pure logic alone in the mind of a theist or an agnostic, who may well have a valid claim of understanding or even, perhaps, one that is true.
Again, no disrespect. Just trying to pick and pry lol!
The other point is to perhaps clarify the definition of atheism being used. If it is defined as the position that “god” does not exist, then I think that is non-falsifiable as well because the concept “god” is not properly defined.
OTOH, if one takes atheism to mean one does not asset that “god” exists, that is fairly clear and I think falsifiable.
I might as well say you just "have faith" in your axioms and leave it at that, but that would not be a good faith engagement with your framework of metaphysics and how you arrived at it.
You are also, if I'm not mistaken, using the Empiricist's Fallacy just like I pointed out. I thought you were an Objectivist, not a hardline empirical falsificationist.
Well, from an objectivist point of view, Rand discusses the axiomatic nature of the assumption that there is an objective reality which is knowable and that valid concepts should refer to them.
Going further back in metaphysics, Aristotle in “Metapphysics” book gamma the less, discusses these axioms.
But if you seriously want to reject that, which some philosophers have, then in my view this discussion must be meaningless, as it refers to nothing, and I find that rather uninteresting.
The study of natural reality and social structures and truths surely has it's place, but I don't see how it negates the metaphysical truths. Objectivism and other such philosophies look to reality through a certain scope (all sciences must have a scope and a proper object, and no science can comprehend the whole of reality at once). I am just saying that the fact that objectivism focuses on certain aspects of reality in no way negates these ones that I am talking about. It doesn't mean they should interest you in particular, just that they must not be simply discarded, for they have their place too in the bigger picture
Well Pawn. If you want to discuss those with me, please define exactly what proposition you are putting forward and describe how it would be falsified.
Otherwise, I don’t have a lot of interest in discussing people’s non-falsifiable beliefs. I just politely acknowledge those are their beliefs.
If you are interested in this sort of metaphysical issue, I do suggest Aristotle’s “Metaphysics”, but of course there are lots of other philosophical treatments. The subject does tend to be a bit involved for discussion on social media.
I'm definitely gonna read this.
I do nothing of the sort. I'm a believer in objective truth. I just don't go about expecting everyone to conceive of it exactly the way that I do before even entertaining their conversations to understand them. No one has the exact same understanding as you. A good epistemology and good discussion skills must account for this. It often seems to me that Objectivists fall pretty short of this one thing, though honestly, let's be real, basically everyone does.
My thing is that I try to understand a concept by trying out different frameworks of thought, perhaps one my interlocutor is using, perhaps one they haven't even thought of yet, so that I understand the actual meaning of the concept, before I reject it or make assertions about it that are likely to be irrelevant or unproductive.
One item I notice in your statements of positions is that you tend to assert what the other person is thinking or assuming. It does strike me that this could interfere with actually understanding the other person’s position accurately.
You are correct that I simply don’t have time to try and understand other people’s non-falsifiable beliefs. If they have them, I just leave that alone generally speaking. I have enough scientific problems I want to try and understand and struggle with and life is finite, especially as we get older.
I do understand that some people, especially those with non-falsifiable beliefs, can be offended by this apparent shortness, so I try and be polite about it.
Still waiting for some falsiability experiment that could disprove the premiss "only falsifiable concepts can be true", or some empirical evidence for the affirmation "only empirical evidence can be true". Choosing non falsifiable and non empirical axioms to later disprove non falsifiable and non empirical concepts seems problematic to say the least. But ok.
Pawn I don’t think there is one. That is axiomatic, as described by Aristotle. Try making any argument, even those here, without assuming that existence exists and that valid concepts refer to reality. It falls apart very quickly.
This is really is a very old philosophical problem on which much ink has been used. So I certainly can’t find a way logically outside that to explain here and would just suggest reading Aristotle on that.
But perhaps Kevin’s Bacon will have more to discuss about it.
There is one other aspect of this I think is interesting to consider as a neuroscientist. From my perspective all our thoughts and concepts correspond to some activity of neurons in our brain. And our brain is an evolved organ which evolved to help us predict the environment and act in ways that propagated our genes.
So in this sense logic and axioms are fundamental arrangements of activity that help us achieve that goal.
Something to ponder.
Yeah I love this insight, I used it to formulate a sort of basis for my own codified epistemology that's roughly based on a realist interpretation of Kant (screw idealism or the assumption that the real world is unknowable and dismissable). Piaget also has something that sort of answers this as saying that every truth is a tool in a framework within which it applies. But I haven't read much about it yet, just discovered him.
Realism rules. Aquinas is the GOAT
You don't happen to know portuguese, do you? The best book I've ever read on the topic of gnosiology and epistemology is "Gnosiologia Pluridimensional", by the latvian Father Stanislavs LadusĂŁns, but it was written in portuguese and has no translations that I know of. This book is a gem. If you can, try to find it and ask for help translating it. It would be a great service to the philosophy world
Honestly that's totally fine. My original post was a discussion essentially about Objectivists' argumentation regarding God and their assertions relating that to their metaphysics, so that was of course the focus of my further debate into it. I thought it very relevant to the discussion as this was my original intent and interest in critiquing.
The idea itself is something I have spent quite a bit of time pondering over, and what I found lacking from any Objectivist sources or debaters was a serious discussion of the topic that gave any further insight at all, or that even considered the stronger arguments that could be posed by theists or agnostics, of which I have about 30 years of experience being and thinking from those frameworks.