Born and raised in north america, went to a baptist church as a kid so I’m fairly familiar with the bible as well as different types of religious people you’ll meet.
As an agnostic now, my only core belief is I know that I don’t know. That’s something I apply to any philosophical question so it’s alien to me that some people can separate logic and religion.
For me, I get that logic too is just models that predict things. Backwards or forwards. But it doesn’t answer what anything is. You can only EXPERIENCE what something is, but you can never accurately represent it. Because the moment you try to represent an experience, it’s not the experience itself, just a representation. So logical conclusion is that the only way to know something for sure, is to experience it as it is before any representation.
People with religious experiences may get to the ineffable truth but then they get enamored by their own attempts to represent it. They focus on the representation, instead of the experience, and they start to insist that their representation is the bestest and most correctest - because everything in their head aligns to it. Then it just becomes a matter of who has the most charismatic foghorns and the most appealing representation. Which has a very reasonable logic of it’s own, as far as it goes.
Logic is reasoning based on proveable facts so no it’s not going to tell you what something is, just how probable something is.
That wouldn’t be the logical conclusion because we are limited as humans. We make mistakes, we don’t understand everything, we misremember, we can even gaslight ourselves such as the mandela effect. If 50 people told me they experienced an alien abduction, that doesn’t make it logically true, now if they were to show me proveable facts of the abduction then I would be more inclined to believe.
I’m not sure what you mean with the last paragraph, you are clearly describing illogical subjective experiences but calling them “very reasonable logic of it’s own”. What you are describing isn’t logic, what you’re describing is the opposite of logic. Someone claiming something they believe is true but can’t provide validity.
You said that you don’t know for sure if it’s matter or consciousness that comes first but everything you’re saying hinges on you very firmly believing that matter is prior.
If you had genuine uncertainty about it, you would be much more careful about how you go about asking for proof. If you weren’t sure that matter is prior, it would occur to you to question what “objective” and “subjective” means. I could also ask you, can you step outside consciousness and objectively prove to me that your matter exists? If not, why do you value objective over subjective so much?
So to round back to your initial question: you can intellectually acknowledge the difficulty of proving matter vs. consciousness, yet if we probe it, clearly you hold a firm belief about it despite not being able to rationally prove your belief. So you can ask your initial question from yourself now. Despite your reasoning skill, why aren’t you more skeptical about the materialist view AND it’s implications?
Can you point out what specifically makes you think I believe that? If it will clear things up I will give you my opinion about the subject outright, I would say it depends on whether there is a creator or not, does this creator have a physical form, where did they come from, what allows them to create life, and many more questions. This question can’t be answered with our knowledge and it is built on other unanswerable concepts so any answer is just a guess.
Could you explain what that has to do with understanding objective and subjective means? I cannot prove to you that anything exists, I can’t even prove to you that we live in the same reality, or that you are a sentient being and not a figment of my imagination. “I think, therefore I am”, I can observe my reality but I can neither prove my existence nor confirm my observations are correct. The only conclusion that leaves me with is, I know that I don’t know.
I don’t value objectivity over subjectivity unless we’re talking about logic because logic is about overcoming subjective beliefs to find the objective truth, so it should follow that I hold your logic to the rigidity that it’s defined by no?
And again, you are making assumptions about me with no truth behind them.
Every time you’re challenged on your beliefs, you claim to not know, but when you’re challenging other people’s beliefs you use words like “irrational” and “illogical”.
You don’t behave like someone who is calmly on the fence at all.
I worry that your debating position and your actual beliefs are out of alignment and I’m not sure whether you’re misleading us or yourself.
They are just trying to align everything that’s being said to their previously held beliefs. People aren’t typically all that aware of what their core beliefs are because an alternative, challenging core belief would have to breach all the way into it for it them to realize they have one. Without the salient contrast, they just don’t notice it’s there. It’s just blue against a blue background, and unless a yellow comes along, they’re not going to realize there’s anything there. The materialistic worldview is so prevalent that a random online conversation isn’t likely to get through, no matter how well argued. I’ve had similar discussions many times and sooner or later people just kind of “reset” and I find myself having to say the same things again and again because there’s just this impenetrable thought loop going on. Logic doesn’t breach it, it’s just that they keep asking for all the different ways we can reach the number 42. If I tell them 41+1=42, they ask again and I have to try to explain how 40+2 is also 42, and so on ad nauseum. “Hahaa, but there’s a 33-4347+132562+767368, I bet you can’t do anything to get that to 42”. That can be done all day. If the person isn’t truly open for new ways to think (and few people in these type of settings are), as in they aren’t actively looking for it with an open curiosity, it’s not likely they’ll realize much during that convo.
It’s really, really, natural and normal. I just thought it was funny because OP is behaving the exact same way they’re asking about in their initial post. They’ll probably eventually figure it out.
If I don’t know something then im going to say I don’t know, am I supposed to make up an answer? I call it irrational and illogical to be confident in something noone can know, which is the opposite of my stance.
What exactly are you reading as “not calm”? I’ve talked nothing but logic, no emotion involved in this at all yet the other guy is taking leaps and bounds to make assumptions of me that have all been incorrect guesses.
What exactly is it that confuses you so I can clear it up?
You present yourself as an agnostic but are very one sided in the debate, and you only have criticism for religious people. If you’re going to use words like irrational and illogical for religious beliefs, at least have the intellectual honesty that your position is far more atheist than you’re admitting to us or yourself. It’s not nuanced or balanced at all.
You really don’t need to go far to find proof that what you just said was false. I said people who claim with certainty that matter came before conciousness are as unintelligent as someone claiming they know what happens in the afterlife.
Born and raised in north america, went to a baptist church as a kid so I’m fairly familiar with the bible as well as different types of religious people you’ll meet.
As an agnostic now, my only core belief is I know that I don’t know. That’s something I apply to any philosophical question so it’s alien to me that some people can separate logic and religion.
For me, I get that logic too is just models that predict things. Backwards or forwards. But it doesn’t answer what anything is. You can only EXPERIENCE what something is, but you can never accurately represent it. Because the moment you try to represent an experience, it’s not the experience itself, just a representation. So logical conclusion is that the only way to know something for sure, is to experience it as it is before any representation.
People with religious experiences may get to the ineffable truth but then they get enamored by their own attempts to represent it. They focus on the representation, instead of the experience, and they start to insist that their representation is the bestest and most correctest - because everything in their head aligns to it. Then it just becomes a matter of who has the most charismatic foghorns and the most appealing representation. Which has a very reasonable logic of it’s own, as far as it goes.
Logic is reasoning based on proveable facts so no it’s not going to tell you what something is, just how probable something is.
That wouldn’t be the logical conclusion because we are limited as humans. We make mistakes, we don’t understand everything, we misremember, we can even gaslight ourselves such as the mandela effect. If 50 people told me they experienced an alien abduction, that doesn’t make it logically true, now if they were to show me proveable facts of the abduction then I would be more inclined to believe.
I’m not sure what you mean with the last paragraph, you are clearly describing illogical subjective experiences but calling them “very reasonable logic of it’s own”. What you are describing isn’t logic, what you’re describing is the opposite of logic. Someone claiming something they believe is true but can’t provide validity.
You said that you don’t know for sure if it’s matter or consciousness that comes first but everything you’re saying hinges on you very firmly believing that matter is prior.
If you had genuine uncertainty about it, you would be much more careful about how you go about asking for proof. If you weren’t sure that matter is prior, it would occur to you to question what “objective” and “subjective” means. I could also ask you, can you step outside consciousness and objectively prove to me that your matter exists? If not, why do you value objective over subjective so much?
So to round back to your initial question: you can intellectually acknowledge the difficulty of proving matter vs. consciousness, yet if we probe it, clearly you hold a firm belief about it despite not being able to rationally prove your belief. So you can ask your initial question from yourself now. Despite your reasoning skill, why aren’t you more skeptical about the materialist view AND it’s implications?
Can you point out what specifically makes you think I believe that? If it will clear things up I will give you my opinion about the subject outright, I would say it depends on whether there is a creator or not, does this creator have a physical form, where did they come from, what allows them to create life, and many more questions. This question can’t be answered with our knowledge and it is built on other unanswerable concepts so any answer is just a guess.
Could you explain what that has to do with understanding objective and subjective means? I cannot prove to you that anything exists, I can’t even prove to you that we live in the same reality, or that you are a sentient being and not a figment of my imagination. “I think, therefore I am”, I can observe my reality but I can neither prove my existence nor confirm my observations are correct. The only conclusion that leaves me with is, I know that I don’t know.
I don’t value objectivity over subjectivity unless we’re talking about logic because logic is about overcoming subjective beliefs to find the objective truth, so it should follow that I hold your logic to the rigidity that it’s defined by no?
And again, you are making assumptions about me with no truth behind them.
Every time you’re challenged on your beliefs, you claim to not know, but when you’re challenging other people’s beliefs you use words like “irrational” and “illogical”.
You don’t behave like someone who is calmly on the fence at all.
I worry that your debating position and your actual beliefs are out of alignment and I’m not sure whether you’re misleading us or yourself.
They are just trying to align everything that’s being said to their previously held beliefs. People aren’t typically all that aware of what their core beliefs are because an alternative, challenging core belief would have to breach all the way into it for it them to realize they have one. Without the salient contrast, they just don’t notice it’s there. It’s just blue against a blue background, and unless a yellow comes along, they’re not going to realize there’s anything there. The materialistic worldview is so prevalent that a random online conversation isn’t likely to get through, no matter how well argued. I’ve had similar discussions many times and sooner or later people just kind of “reset” and I find myself having to say the same things again and again because there’s just this impenetrable thought loop going on. Logic doesn’t breach it, it’s just that they keep asking for all the different ways we can reach the number 42. If I tell them 41+1=42, they ask again and I have to try to explain how 40+2 is also 42, and so on ad nauseum. “Hahaa, but there’s a 33-4347+132562+767368, I bet you can’t do anything to get that to 42”. That can be done all day. If the person isn’t truly open for new ways to think (and few people in these type of settings are), as in they aren’t actively looking for it with an open curiosity, it’s not likely they’ll realize much during that convo.
It’s really, really, natural and normal. I just thought it was funny because OP is behaving the exact same way they’re asking about in their initial post. They’ll probably eventually figure it out.
If I don’t know something then im going to say I don’t know, am I supposed to make up an answer? I call it irrational and illogical to be confident in something noone can know, which is the opposite of my stance.
What exactly are you reading as “not calm”? I’ve talked nothing but logic, no emotion involved in this at all yet the other guy is taking leaps and bounds to make assumptions of me that have all been incorrect guesses.
What exactly is it that confuses you so I can clear it up?
You present yourself as an agnostic but are very one sided in the debate, and you only have criticism for religious people. If you’re going to use words like irrational and illogical for religious beliefs, at least have the intellectual honesty that your position is far more atheist than you’re admitting to us or yourself. It’s not nuanced or balanced at all.
You really don’t need to go far to find proof that what you just said was false. I said people who claim with certainty that matter came before conciousness are as unintelligent as someone claiming they know what happens in the afterlife.