LogFAQs > #1007920

LurkerFAQs ( 06.29.2011-09.11.2012 ), Active DB, DB1, DB2, DB3, DB4, DB5, DB6, DB7, DB8, DB9, DB10, DB11, DB12, Clear
Topic List
Page List: 1
TopicQuestion for the Atheists on the board.
JeffreyRaze
04/14/12 9:28:00 PM
#305:


Have you read the Meditations? The entire point of the cogito sum is to be a building block for other formulations. This is also true of your worldview, or at least it appears this way.

That is true that it is one of the foundations for my worldview, but... Well, is there somewhere online I can read the meditations, or would I need to try to find a hardcopy somewhere? Because I will freely admit I don't really understand what you've been saying.

...Let me just quote myself:

"It doesn't do anything to answer the question of what base reality is."


Ah, so you're asking me to make a grand sweeping statement that covers the entirety of reality. I can't do that however. I can only describe base reality relative to subjective reality.

This is wonderful question-dodging. Whether it's proving or disproving, why is science able to tell "true" apart from "untrue" in regards to base reality?

Alright then. If my assumptions hold, then the universe is ordered. Thus, experimentation will not produce a result that contradicts that order. Which is how they can reject things as true. If a very large number of tests designed to check a property we're investigating never once produces a result that contradicts said order, then it is likely to be true. By performing various experiments we can investigate that order itself, which provides us with a greater understanding of what the universe is and how it functions. It's circular, but that's because it builds on itself. Simple things like "apples fall towards the ground, and never fall away from it" can grant us insight into certain aspects of truth behind reality. All of these truths will be empirical, but of course science only deals with the empirical. If hunting for other forms of truth, you'd have to use a different method.

All of these are empirical claims (except for that last one, which is another can of worms), which, again, implies that "base reality" is empirical. Why?

We keep coming back to this, and as of yet you haven't provided an answer.


The last one is just as empirical as any other. Science can only work with empirical truths, never anything else. I'm not implying science is the only method towards truth, merely that it is very good at discovering empirical truth. Regardless of what base reality is, if the assumptions hold then at least part of base reality is empirical, and that's what I have the ability to access. So that's what I'll pursue.

Then you probably shouldn't be engaging in questions of philosophy!

I was just stating my worldview! And besides, just because I'm not interested in studying the culinary arts doesn't mean I can't cook and discuss the merits of various cooked things.

Independent of the objection I've made a dozen times already that the scientific method as of yet as been uncritically accepted as "truth," why does intersubjective verifiability correspond to the way the world "actually" is? Regardless of whether we're talking about the scientific method or otherwise?

It's not uncritically accepted as truth >_>. But anyways, it doesn't necessarily correspond to the way the world actually is, but it raises the probability that it does which makes it a better method. The less dependent a method is on very specific conditions, the more robust the method. Science is powerful precisely because it has far fewer conditionals on its results that many other methods. Once again, this doesn't make anything it claims true, it just means that given only the information we have access to, it takes a lot less assumption than other methods.

--
http://desmond.imageshack.us/Himg26/scaled.php?server=26&filename=jeffreyraze.png&res=medium
... Copied to Clipboard!
Topic List
Page List: 1