Teachable Moment: A math puzzle and the nature of metaphysics (behavior, exist)

[mordant]

Originally Posted by Gaylenwoof

Theism introduces some weird, exotic expectations that are sorta like smoking crack. One's ability to generate the natural endorphins of feeling good is compromised by the Theistic High, and withdrawal is a b*tch.

Couldn't have said it better myself.

Originally Posted by Gaylenwoof

Ultimately, I am an Existentialist. I believe very strongly in the ultimate Absurdity of Existence. I am highly confident that there is no "Ultimate Meaning" for anything, and even if there were such a Meaning, I don't think it would be (or even logically could be) a theistic-style God who provides it. ...

My bottom line point is that we are not just random or deterministic collections of independent atoms floating in a vacuum that pointlessly clump together and pointlessly flail around for 70 years before pointlessly dissolving back into the vacuum. Each of us is Reality Itself creating meaning, and the mechanism by which we create meaning is our ability to weave the multicolored threads of qualitative feeling into a fabric of patterns that, in complementary fashion, both "instantly dissolve" and "never truly dissolve" - depending on how you look at it.

I have no quarrel or reservations at all with any of this, except maybe the last sentence.

That we are part of reality does not mean that it is "reality itself" that "makes meaning". That is rather like saying that because I am a citizen of the US, I am the US itself.

I find it far simpler to say that we are, individually, and sometimes cooperatively, meaning-makers and we do that primarily by story-telling and fitting ourselves into our constructed narratives. Those narratives are increasingly reality-based as we learn to control for our biases and preconceptions.

I do not want to escape the quality crack cocaine of fundamentalist Christianity only to go on the crystal meth of an alternative inflation, that I am a manifestation of some sort of over-mind.

I am just Mordant, another ordinary guy* making his way the best he knows how. It is sufficient.

Of course this leaves us to die as we were born and as we've lived: fundamentally, in a sense, alone. I think it is this loneliness and accompanying alienation that both conventional theism and pantheistic notions (and other subjective belief systems such as romantic ideals of love) attempt to address. It is understandable but in my view not supportable. I prefer to run to the roar, to engage with reality as it is, even when it "bites".

* Why in the heck is "s c h m u c k" filtered as a naughty word?? This site seems to have a bad case of the S c u n t h o r p e Problem.

[MysticPhD]

Originally Posted by MysticPhD

I am confused as to what you think I misunderstood in your post, mordant. I know that you are afflicted by God-o-phobia and given your experiences understandably so. But what did I misunderstand?

Originally Posted by mordant

I appreciated your kind remarks but feel that you concluded that simply because I recognize that science has limitations that I necessarily think there are or must or should be any viable alternatives to it.
Science is just a field of human endeavor and as such is subject to human limitations. We get into trouble when we reach beyond our ken. Science has not expanded our innate capabilities but rather, helped us to make the most of them. We still have finite limitations, and this makes us feel insecure and to desire transcendence. Even if we have to manufacture it out of whole cloth. I do not advocate this. I advocate acceptance.

Okay, but the acceptance of those limitations does NOT make reality actually HAVE those limitations. That tends to be the corollary to the materialism espoused by most atheists here on the forum. They exclude from the possible those things that cannot conform to or currently be explained by science. They reject legitimate hypotheses DERIVED from existing knowledge in science because of the limitation. They lump them into the same category as the illegitimate and completely fanciful hypotheticals, like tooth fairies, unicorns, leprechauns and Flying Spaghetti Monsters. THAT is the fallacious and illogical reasoning that characterizes most atheist thought, Gaylen notwithstanding. They consider the philosophical, logical and extrapolative reasoning to be pointless and illegitimate despite its quite legitimate provenance and history of success in advancing the cause of science on the frontiers.

Originally Posted by KCfromNC

There's no question that some people build up intricate personal narratives about what is going on. The outstanding question is how much do these personal narratives have to do with reality.
And:
And I won't even pick on you too much for trying to sneak in the idea that logical deduction is the best way to evaluate choices of epistemological methods - another idea which philosophers seem stuck on even though it doesn't work.

From what I can see, metaphysics doesn't really rule much of anything out. So claims that it doesn't rule out idea X isn't exactly a ringing endorsement of the idea - it pretty much leaves it as valid (or not) as it was before it got the metaphysics stamp of approval.

QED!!!

[Katzpur]

Originally Posted by TroutDude

8+11=96

YES! I'm going to go right out and apply for Mensa! U 2?

[TroutDude]

Originally Posted by Katzpur

YES! I'm going to go right out and apply for Mensa! U 2?

I found out my IQ by accident in Grade 10, when I was 14. I was in the Principal's office, awaiting the strap. I forget what my particular transgression was that time. I was just idly/stoically awaiting the return of 9-Fingered Sister Lisa. (She was missing the baby finger of her right, strap-wielding hand.)

She was a diminutive woman, not more than 5' tall. So, in order to get a tad more leverage into her strapping, she had a small stool upon which she'd stand when administering what we referred to as "The Beaver Tail."

That's what the heavy, studded rubber strap resembled - a tapered, heavy beaver tail.

Anyway, I forget why she wasn't there when I was told to go into her office. But there, open upon her desk, were the results of the IQ tests we'd taken a week or two before.

I found out I could read upside down.

So, I learned I was supposedly smart enough for Mensa just a few minutes before my hands smarted enough that I couldn't wait to cool them in the snow outside.

[mordant]

Originally Posted by MysticPhD

Okay, but the acceptance of those limitations does NOT make reality actually HAVE those limitations. That tends to be the corollary to the materialism espoused by most atheists here on the forum. They exclude from the possible those things that cannot conform to or currently be explained by science. They reject legitimate hypotheses DERIVED from existing knowledge in science because of the limitation. They lump them into the same category as the illegitimate and completely fanciful hypotheticals, like tooth fairies, unicorns, leprechauns and Flying Spaghetti Monsters. THAT is the fallacious and illogical reasoning that characterizes most atheist thought, Gaylen notwithstanding. They consider the philosophical, logical and extrapolative reasoning to be pointless and illegitimate despite its quite legitimate provenance and history of success in advancing the cause of science on the frontiers.

I do not deny possibilities; I am after all agnostic about deities and as someone who respects science I have to be open to evaluate any valid hypothesis. But I do judge probabilities using the best methods available as well.

I find this to be a common point of confusion with theists. Some theist or other here recently gave the example that science would "insist" that someone falling from a great height would necessarily die and would tend to "deny" incidents of "miraculous" survival. And of course that's not true. Science would always allow for the unlikely possibility of survival under certain constrained circumstances. And of course those edge cases generally have difficult and often unsatisfactory recoveries anyway. So they are exceptions that prove a point: if you jump off the 20th floor you are unlikely to survive and may wish that you hadn't even if you do. Outliers, real as they are, don't materially undermine that statement.

[MysticPhD]

Originally Posted by KCfromNC

8+11 = 33. The pattern is "add 5 + 2n" to the previous answer.
8+11 = 28. The pattern is "alternate between adding 7 then 9 to the previous answer"
8+11 = 30. The pattern is "add 9 to get the next answer". The first line isn't part of the pattern.
8+11 = 38. The pattern is "the ? equals the previous 3 answers"
8+11 = 28. The pattern is "add 16 to the answer from two lines up". Note that this is different from the other 28 above even though it reduces to it in this particular example.
If you look hard enough you can find any answer you want in noise like this. Which is right? It's whatever the guy or girl who made it up says it is.
Trying to link that to atheists needing to reject materialism to really feel the magic of consciousness is quite a stretch - there's obviously some other sort of agenda at play here.

Tlak about missing the entire point! "Underdetermined" problem IS the point, eg., insufficient knowledge to find a specific answer but enough to find some answers dependent upon the perspective you choose.

[KCfromNC]

Originally Posted by MysticPhD

Tlak about missing the entire point! "Underdetermined" problem IS the point, eg., insufficient knowledge to find a specific answer but enough to find some answers dependent upon the perspective you choose.

Great. So what's your wonderful fantastic new perspective and how do we know it is better than what has worked really well for the past few centuries?

[KCfromNC]

Originally Posted by MysticPhD

They reject legitimate hypotheses

Please be specific - what legitimate hypotheses are people rejecting? Is this your pet religion that has god's mind is powered by dark energy flowing out of the thoughts of alien species throughout the universe or did you mean something else?

[Gaylenwoof]

Originally Posted by mordant

That we are part of reality does not mean that it is "reality itself" that "makes meaning". That is rather like saying that because I am a citizen of the US, I am the US itself.
[...]
I do not want to escape the quality crack cocaine of fundamentalist Christianity only to go on the crystal meth of an alternative inflation, that I am a manifestation of some sort of over-mind.

People are often confused (and I don't blame them) when I employ the holistic "Reality Itself" concept. It is difficult to avoid picturing a "Cosmic Mind" or "over-mind" as you say that is presumably having some higher-level "God's Eye View" of reality. People often think in terms of the metaphor "We are like neurons in a Cosmic Brain" and, as neurons, we have no comprehension of what the Cosmic Brain is thinking. I understand why people adopt this imagery, and I don't deny this "Cosmic Mind" idea as a possibility, but for what it is worth let me state as clearly as I possibly can: This type of imagery is not what I'm trying to get at when I say that "Reality Itself" has qualitative experience, or "makes meaning" etc. (BTW: You, mordant, are probably in a somewhat better position than most people to understand the more subtle concept I'm dealing with since you are familiar with this thread and have read the article about "The Logic of Experience" that I referenced in post #7 of that thread.)

I am not advocating the idea that Reality Itself is conscious as-a-whole (the Cosmic Mind view) nor am I suggesting that every part of Reality is conscious (panpsychism). I am arguing that when two instances (say X and Y) of conscious experience occur, there is no good empirical or logical basis for individuating the qualitative "raw feels" of these experiences at the ontological ground level. There is clearly an epistemological divide - you do not literally feel my pain when I tell you I have a toothache, and I don't feel your pain when you tell me you have tennis elbow - but this epistemological divide does not necessarily imply an ontological individuation between one "soul" and another.

I am taking a straight-up atheist position, denying the existence of individual "soul stuffs", and a straight-up materialist-style position, denying there are non-physical "mind stuffs" in your brain and mine. You don't have some "mind stuff" that feels your pain that is ontologically distinct from some "mind stuff" that I have when I feel my pain. It is clearly the case the "pain is felt" and there is clearly a qualitative difference between "tooth pain" and "elbow pain" just as there is a material difference between tooth and elbow, and a material distinction between "your" body and "mine". But who is experiencing these pains? There are two complementary answers (mutually exclusive, and yet both correct, depending on the perspective of the questioner): (1) "No one" and (2) "Reality Itself." Notice what is missing here: There are no individual "selves" i.e., "you" and "me" or "your soul" and "my soul" who individually experience the pains.

The concept of "self" is generally linked to the idea of an "entity" that is thought of as "being at the center of" a series of experiences, wherein "I" have "my" self and "you" have "yours." My proposal is that "selves" of this sort simply do not exist. There are no "entities" and no "centers" of the sort that the concept of "self" implies. Thus (1) is correct, according to my proposal.

But it also seems clear that every experience seems like "mine". There seems to be an "I" at the center of each of my experiences, and this "I" seems to persist from one experience to another. Descartes was partially right and partially wrong with his famous "I think, therefore I am." I cannot logically deny that experience exists, and I cannot logically deny that experience seems to have a "thinking thing" at the center who "has" the experience, but it does not necessarily follow that an individual "I" exists who "has" the experience - as if the "I" and the "experience" are ontologically divisible. The point of Descartes radical skepticism was to doubt everything that could logically be doubted. We can't logically doubt experience, per se, but we can logically doubt the notion of an ontologically distinct "being who has" the experience, despite the overwhelming feeling that there is such a being. It could be that the feeling that there is a "being who has" is, itself, just an aspect of the experience itself - not actually an ontologically distinct entity separable from the experience. This is "Aristotelian" (as opposed to Platonic) metaphysics. The "self" just is the experience - not an ontologically distinct "essence" so to speak "floating around in Plato's heaven" who might or might not have experience. If there is no "self" in Descartes' sense, but self-conscious experience feels like an I, then this "feeling like an I" is noting that can be ontologically individuated into a separate "you" and "me". So what is left? There is, plain and simply just Reality Itself "feeling like an I" in each and every instance in which there is some "feeling like an I." There is no "I" apart from just "feeling like an I" and "feeling" is just the nature of Reality Itself, thus (2) is also correct.

In other words, you could think of this as a "purely empirical" type of metaphysics. The "essence" or "ontological ground" of any being is nothing other than, or nothing in addition to, just simply the essence of Reality Itself - which can be thought of in terms of the "pregnant Void" or the "pure potential" of the physical vacuum of physics - but we know, first hand, that qualitative experience happens, so clearly the potential of Reality Itself is qualitative - or, at least, has a qualitative aspect. Notice this is a qualitative Void or physical vacuum - not a High Level Intelligence, or a Cosmic Mind. The qualitative Void is unconscious - but unconscious in the sense of potentially conscious, and this potentially conscious aspect is what I refer to as the qualitative aspect. That's just what qualitative is - it is potential-for-contents-of-conscious-experience, or the potential-to-effect conscious experience, either directly (as contents) or indirectly (as factors selecting or determining contents). The latter are indirectly assessable via abstract thought. This is where "quantitative" fits together with "qualitative." We can only guess that quantitative factors are real because ultimately it is only the qualitative contents of experience that we directly know.

BTW: If there is any aspect of Realty that is not qualitative (directly or indirectly), then obviously it is an aspect of Reality that we can never know anything about; it is, in effect, a "difference that makes no difference" as far as anything we can ever know, so it would be "pure metaphysics" in the most derogatory sense - a completely pointless speculation than can never make any real difference to anyone. All that can ever really matter to us, so far as we can ever know, are the qualitative aspects of Reality - the aspect that can, in principle, make some difference, either directly or indirectly, to conscious experience.

Bottom line: We are not ontologically "special" - either as individuals, or as a species - but truly comprehending what it means to be "not special" is an astounding realization. I am not an ontologically isolated or "in-itself" type of entity, I am not a unique being or essence floating around in a giant box called a "universe." In fact, there is actually no "I" at all. There is just physical Reality and Reality is the sort of thing that "sometimes it feels like an "I"; sometimes it don't".

[mordant]

Originally Posted by Gaylenwoof

Bottom line: We are not ontologically "special" - either as individuals, or as a species - but truly comprehending what it means to be "not special" is an astounding realization. I am not an ontologically isolated or "in-itself" type of entity, I am not a unique being or essence floating around in a giant box called a "universe." In fact, there is actually no "I" at all. There is just physical Reality and Reality is the sort of thing that "sometimes it feels like an "I"; sometimes it don't".

OK, I understand that you are not talking about what I thought you were.

But look at that sentence I just wrote. "I understand". It would seem that I experience life AS an individual (or at least AS IF I am one). You can recast that as "the universe understands in this way at this time" but it won't make me feel any less individuated or make my experience any more non-dual.

I agree that realizing my non-specialness and unimportance had profound implications -- for ME anyway. I doubt MY realization had much impact on YOURS. So ... it remains to be seen whether you are making distinctions without difference or whether your way of seeing yourself and others is testable, descriptive, predictive and actionable.