Existential crisis, maybe?

Hello everyone.

I am currently very confused with the nature of reality, and how I should be thinking. I can't imagine that anyone here will have an absolute answer, but I am hoping to be grounded a little. The biggest problem I am having now, is one of epistemology; I am having a very hard time trying to solidify "facts" or "knowledge" in my mind. I have a habit of taking in all views, and opinions, as possibilities, but I do not know what to accept for certain. I've recently spent a lot of time watching, and reading debates on the internet, usually to do with Science vs Religion, or Atheists vs Creationists. Some of the arguments from creationists really confuse me. Things like "You can't justify logic with logic", and "not believing in god is a belief", "everything is subjective", "Something had to create the Universe", "Quantum mechanics explains spirituality", "The Scientific Method is flawed", "The Universe is an illusion, so evidence is pointless", "Math is subjective", etc. I try to rationalize these things, and my logic tells me that their reasoning is flawed, or that the propositions that they make in their premise is too much of an assumption. Despite my best efforts to analyse logically, I can't help but think that maybe logic itself is just a belief, or that they must know something that I don't. As you can see, I am very confused...what do you think? Sorry for writing half a novel, by the way.

 

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I wouldn't spend much more time worrying about what the creationists are up to. It has nothing to do with science.

 

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I'm really finding it hard to differentiate between pseudo-science, and real science. I also have friends that tend to debate for spirituality, and use quantum physics as proof. Quantum physics certainly isn't an area I am well researched, so I do not know if they are right on not. They use a lot of quantum terminology, and seem to know what they are talking about...although the things they suggest seem implausible to me, but maybe I'm too stupid to understand.

 

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Do you thank it maters much which path you take... science or spirituality.???

 

Anyone who even brings quantum physics into a discussion on "spirituality" (let alone as "proof") is not only ignorant of quantum physics but also culpable of gross stupidity.
Any argument using such premises is basically along the lines of "I can't explain "spirit" and I can't explain quantum physics either, therefore the latter is a scientific explanation of the former".
You can't (rationally) use ignorance of one subject to justify a claim about a non-scientific belief.
"Quantum terminology" tends to be used a LOT by promoters of woo precisely for the reason that it sounds scientific. But it's a specious use.

 

I'd call that the human condition. I don't think that anyone knows the answers to the really big questions.

I'm inclined to think of facts as actually existing states of affairs. Philosophically speaking, a fact is the worldly correlate of a true proposition, it's whatever makes a true proposition true.

Knowledge is a cognitive state, traditionally described as justified true belief.

Yes, I do that too. When looked at that way, 'true' and 'false' start to look like cognitive ideals. In real life, pretty much every proposition seems to fall somewhere in the middle, possessing some epistemic weight, ranging from 'almost certainly false' to 'almost certainly true'.

I think that's correct. An attempt to use logic to justify logic would seem to be circular reasoning, assuming what's to be proven.

In practice, most atheists seem to take much stronger positions than that. They believe that 'God' (whatever that means) doesn't exist. They believe that no plausible justification exists for believing in 'God'. They often identify 'religion' in general with belief in 'God', and seem convinced that 'religion' is a bad thing that needs to be opposed. They often seem to hold the view that science and religion are opposed to one another.

Those are all pretty clearly beliefs, some more defensible than others.

I'd characterize the objective/subjective distinction this way:

'Chickens have feathers' is a statement that some subject (me) makes about some object (chickens). It's a statement about the objective world (the world of facts in which chickens are found) and hence objective.

'Chicken tastes good' is different. It isn't really about chickens at all, it's about how I, the subject, perceive chickens to taste. A subjective statement is really the subject talking about him/her self.

The problem here is that some popular philosophical theories proclaim that all that human beings can possibly know is our own experience (imagined as something that exists in its own right, like a display on a video monitor), and that any objective world out there beyond our own heads is merely a mental construct.

I'm very much a realist and don't for a moment want to deny the existence or the knowability of the objective world. The bounds of my awareness aren't the limits of existence.

I'll say that I don't see how a belief that "everything is subjective" would serve a theist's purposes. Theists seem to want to believe that God really exists in the strongest ontological sense. They don't seem to want to agree with the atheists that God is nothing more than a subjective idea in our own mind. After all, the subject is supposed to be dependent upon God, not God dependent on the subject.

That's a metaphysical belief that seems to me to be impossible to justify. If we define 'universe' to mean 'everything that exists', then we face more problems, since there wouldn't be anything else in existence to do the creating.

Another metaphysical belief, and one that strikes me as bullshit.

I think that the whole idea of there being a single 'Scientific Method' that science always follows, that explains science's dramatic success, and that serves to distinguish science from non-scientific activities, is flawed. That doubt is widespread among philosophers of science and among scientists themselves. But doubt about the Scientific Method isn't popular here on Sciforums and expressing it gets people flamed.

Kant seems to have thought so. He insisted that mathematics was a form of the understanding that the human mind imposes on uninterpreted 'noumenal' reality in order to construct the world of experience.

As for me, I don't know what mathematics is or how human beings come to know about it. I don't have a clue why the physical universe seems to conform to mathematical principles.

You seem to have produced a list of outstanding philosophical mysteries. The ancient Greeks were the first to write about many of them, and they are equally puzzling today.

It was a good post. Welcome to the board, btw.

Don't get too upset by the realization that all of us are surrounded by mysteries all the time. Realizing that is what makes a person a philosopher.

 

If you think absolutes in philosophy are your problem, welcome to my world. That is exactly the part of philosophy that eventually caused me to give up on it. All that remains is a knowledge of the way it should have been taught along with the impression that philosophy is the fulfillment of a taxonomy of ignorance based mostly on equivocation and word games. I'm not kidding.

If there was a baby in that bathwater I threw out along with philosophy, it was the idea that things like truth, liberty, freedom, etc. are anything but absolute. This should have been included at the top of the syllabus of a course named philosophy 101. It wasn't. Too bad, and also, too late.

Even mathematical truth and the many simplifying assumptions that makes it easier to comprehend in principle are manifestly not absolute when applied to analyzing anything of a practical nature.

Science is marginally better than superstition only because it is based on a natural selection of ideas. Sometimes induction helps us to make better choices based on what has worked in science before, but apart from the theory of natural selection itself, induction is no guarantee of reliable science (or philosophy) precisely because of the error in the philosophy of absolutes discussed in the preceding paragraphs. Popper should have proposed and applied a test for the demarcation of pseudo philosophy before trying to apply philosophy to the task of demarcation of science vs. pseudoscience. This was his only chance at demonstrating true philosophical genius, and he missed it.

Do you think you might be able to save the baby, Vance? It's also alright if you ultimately decide you can't, you know. It isn't so much a late term abortion as it is a declaration: "go out and get yourselves some philosophy worth learning, ignorant and unclean children". I suspect most will ignore this admonition.

Bright folks like Chris Langan have likewise pitched traditional philosophy in favor of something like CTMU which mocks the foundation of the discipline. If you have read this and did not understand what he was doing, that might be worth a second look as well. Unfortunately, even Chris missed any discussion of absolutes.

 

Why would you do that?

Entertainment value, perhaps? Finally found that Mensa International version of The Jerry Springer Show?

Or the reverse? Meds for insomnia not working?

 

Logic is self justifying.

 

If by "self-justifying" you mean "self-consistent", I agree.

However, logic is also necessarily incomplete, by Gödel's incompleteness theorem. This means, it is not a path to all truth. This is likewise something I didn't learn, but definitely should have, in philosophy 101. It really would have helped.

Thanks for the assist, spider goat.

 

Thank you all for your great responses!

It really shouldn't, although I have a very strong impulsion to seek the truth, or get as close to the proof as possible. I know it seems like a silly question, but which path is the best option for that?

You really think that the elders do not believe? Do you think they are doing it for money?

This is also what I am inclined to believe, I probably second guess myself too often. I read an article about the misconceptions of Quantum Mechanics, and the one I see most often is the application of quantum laws on a macro scale.

To Yazata:

Thank you so much for your detailed reply, and your kind words. I feel a lot better knowing that I am not alone in the way I think. I really like the way you analyze fact, and I suppose that comes down to whether or not you believe fact exists beyond your own mind or not. In regards to math being subjective, would you say it is fair enough to say that even if math is subjective, the things we count are objective?

To danshawen:

Thank you also, for your detailed reply. I have considered ditching Philosophy, but it seems so fundamental. Having said that, I do think that it can cause one to stray far away from a "simple truth", in the same way that day dreaming about fantasy worlds does. I am not familiar with CTMU, can you please give me a brief abstract of what it is about? I'm not 100% sure what the fate of the baby will be, I guess I will have to wait and see. Thanks again danshawen.

I wanted to see both sides of the god debate, in hopes of learning new information. It really is like Mensa International version of the Jerry Springer Show, though. I like that comparison

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. I am not going to self diagnose, but I probably do have insomnia, since I usually can't get to sleep until 5-6 am.

That was my initial thought, spidergoat. I tried to view it as some kind of absolute that just was, but that seems to be a very big assumption. Self-consistent is a really good way of putting it, as danshawen said. I will look up Gödel's theorem, it seems like it could be useful to me.

Thanks again, guys.

 

So is faith in God, to hear the theists tell it.

How should people go about justifying logic with logic, without assuming what is to be proved?

 

The logical absolutes are tautologies. They are self-proving. They can't not be true.

 

This video is a good example of why philosophy is a dead end.

Applying the law of identity (or even the other two tautologies) on a practical basis to anything that is not still in your head ASSUMES someone would know literally everything about the things being compared, down to the last atom and electric charge, or equivalently, which way the wind was blowing. If anything changes, which is inevitable, nothing is ever identical within practical time interval limits. Things age. I aged while watching this video. This test utterly fails for anyone who is not an omniscient deity, so it's not even worth talking about. Liked the color of beard though; not distracting from what he is saying at all.

You can't talk about the truth of anything without defining the limitations of that term FIRST.

 

I enjoyed the video, and I really appreciate the share spidergoat, so thanks for that! I can see how following those "absolutes" is pragmatic for everyday life, but it doesn't seem to help the existential side of things. Is there actually a proof that A = A is an absolute statement? What if someone had severe brain damage, and they perceived A = B? Can A used to represent nothing? Can A be broken down, or divided?

 

What is a 'logical absolute'? And isn't 'tautology' a concept from logic?

Not without ideas such as 'well formed formula', 'truth assignments', 'propositional components' and 'decision procedure' ('truth tables' in particular).

If the problem is the justification of logic, then isn't it circular to introduce logical concepts and assumptions into one's argument?

 

It's self-evident, there is no better proof than that. If anyone perceives that A does not equal A, they can know that they are wrong. A is symbolic, it is still possible that some symbols (words) aren't well defined and open to interpretation.

 

The logical absolutes are facts which are always true in every possible universe, even in the absence of everything. They do not require any system to interpret.

I disagree.

Self-evident means that no assumptions need to be made.

 

It was part of a fundraising venture for CampQuest, a secular summer camp for the children of atheists, rational thinkers, and those with a naturalistic worldview.