I outline inductive risk arguments in this video: th-cam.com/video/YecBcnakxGY/w-d-xo.html The hard problem of everything: th-cam.com/video/xXyfX4A69AA/w-d-xo.html Introduction to the pessimistic induction: th-cam.com/video/6OwjvkeIzXc/w-d-xo.html On assessing the benefits vs dangers of science: th-cam.com/video/ttL5_TFF4EY/w-d-xo.html
How can an instrumentalist agree with the statement "science requires faith"? A tool doesn't care about its user's beliefs, it just either works or it doesn't. If science is just a tool, that means it can be used by anyone, not depending on any assumptions, let alone faith.
@@СергейМакеев-ж2н I think that there are various global skeptical arguments that are insurmountable. You have to make unjustified assumptions in order to get to the claim that we face particular problems, that a particular tool is the best means for solving those problems, etc. In particular, I find the problem of induction compelling, and this strikes explicitly at the instrumentalist use of science -- its use as a predictive device. It doesn't make any difference whether we go for realism or instrumentalism; a bunch of assumptions are required either way.
@@KaneB "Required" for what? For using the algorithms of the scientific method and enjoying its fruits? Why would that require _any_ justified beliefs? Why would it require any _beliefs_ at all? You can as well just, you know, _pretend-believe,_ and you will still get results. Arguably, even a soulless automaton, not capable of "believing" at all, could still do basically the same thing.
@@СергейМакеев-ж2н Sure, a soulless automaton could perform the same observable behaviours as scientists. In principle, we could enact science without any beliefs about it whatsoever. But then we're not interpreting science instrumentally -- we're not interpreting it in any way at all. And I think in practice, people are not actually like this; when they make commitments to long-term projects, they will cite reasons for doing so. Anything that is offered as a reason for engaging in the project, and indeed any attempt to describe the project itself, will be undermined by what in my view are irresolvable skeptical problems. Shifting from beliefs to pretend-beliefs (or any other cognitive attitude) doesn't make any difference to this.
@@KaneB Well yes, that's what I meant - not interpreting the process in any way at all. (Though you can "pretend to interpret" it, if you want.) I guess this comes down to what we mean by "science requires X". It's a matter of putting parentheses in the right places. Watch: "(Doing science in the instrumentalist worldview) requires having beliefs" -> TRUE "Doing science (in the instrumentalist worldview requires having beliefs)" -> FALSE You seem to have intuitively picked the first interpretation (requiring the scientist to _be_ an instrumentalist), while I picked the second (requiring nothing of the scientist, so long as instrumentalism is "true" in the world he lives in). That's why we came to opposite conclusions.
4:05 "I don't believe scientific theories are true, and that's the case even with things like electrons for example. so electrons, unquestionably, seem to play a really important, a really indispensable role in our best explanatory theories, but I don't believe in electrons. I take the idea of electrons to be a kind of useful tool." A useful tool for what? An explanatory theory of what? What makes the tool useful if the tool doesn't exist in reality? What is the mechanism that allows your camera and mic to record this video to be utilized while not existing? Is the current flow in your electronics not detectable? Do you think your computer works by magically incantations? What is a useful tool which does not exist? What would you possible mean by "tool"?
A useful tool for systemising, predicting, and controlling observable phenomena. The useful tool is the idea of electrons, the theory that postulates electrons. Ideas and theories exist; I am agnostic about whether electrons exist. See my "Scientific Realism" playlist for an outline of this debate, and the video "Why I'm not a scientific realist" for some of the reasons why I reject realism. No, I do not think my computer works by magical incantations. I suspend judgment about how things work. I take scientific theories to provide true descriptions of observable regularities, but I am agnostic concerning the theoretical content that explains why those observable regularities obtain. This is just a standard empiricist attitude.
@@KaneB But do you not see the ridiculousness of such a statement. Presumably you also don't believe in photons, and the theory of thermodynamics, and yet here you are using the useful tools of a knitted hat and gloves and jackets to keep you warm. A useful tool that controls observable phenomena means a thing which can be controlled, which means a thing with an identity, which means a thing which exists. It doesn't matter if our description, definition, or visual models of the object do not yet contain all the knowledge will might gain later, all that matters is that we used an existent's identity to produce physical results in the world. You cannot deny the existence of a useful tool, that's a contradiction in terms.
@@ExistenceUniversity Obviously I don't agree that scientific antirealism is ridiculous. I'm not denying the existence of the useful tool. The tool is the theory that postulates e.g. electrons. I'm simply not signing up for the view that the theory is successful in virtue of providing true descriptions of reality beyond what is observable. This is the attitude that everybody has to at least some theories and models -- for example, we still use Newtonian mechanics in various contexts, even though we no longer take it to provide a correct description of the underlying structure of space-time (it has been displaced by general relativity in this respect). Similarly, idealisations such as ideal gases and frictionless planes abound in contemporary science. It is useful in some contexts to model the Sun as if it were composed of an ideal gas; nobody thinks the Sun really is composed of an ideal gas. So probably everybody takes an instrumentalist attitude towards some of the theories and models we use. Antirealists such as myself just extend that attitude a bit further, to theories that have not yet been explicitly falsified.
@@KaneB But you are fundamentally incorrect in your argument here. Newtonian gravitational theory is not dismissed. It works because it is true. It doesn't work for orbits like Mercury, but it works for rockets to the moon. Einstein's GR added to knowledge, it did not make Newton wrong. No scientist thinks that Newtonian mechanics is wrong today just because we have a second set of laws that fix the minor issues at the periphery. You are tossing the baby out with the bathwater. None of this changes the fact that the electron must be something in order to do something. Non-things cannot do things. It must be something.
@@ExistenceUniversity Newtonian mechanics is no longer taken to provide a correct description of the underlying structure of space-time. Nobody is denying that Newtonian mechanics "works" in various contexts. Obviously it works; that was why I used it as an example. It's an extremely powerful tool for predicting and controlling particular classes of observable, despite its errors. I don't claim that electrons do anything. Theories that postulate electrons are used by us to do various things, and theories that postulate electrons do exist. I'm not sure why I have to keep repeating this. You do understand the distinction between "X" and "theory that postulates X", right? Or do I need to explain that?
I think science vs religion is a weird dichotomy. I don't see why many believe they are inherently in opposition of each other. Statistically speaking, the majority of scientists are/were religious, and it's not like every theologian in the world rejects science and scientific claims.
I understand the motivation for the opposition view: most religions make various claims about the world that are incompatible with the stories given in our accepted scientific theories. Historically, there have been prominent cases where these religious claims were seen as particularly important aspects of the religious worldview at the time, so their refutation was taken as a threat to the religion as a whole. Having said this, I think it's a massive simplification -- indeed, outright misleading -- to present science and religion as locked in endless conflict.
The dichotomy was created by the religious, for the most part (at least in the US). It was with cases like the Scopes trial (1925) where Christian fundamentalists (a movement in the late 1800s-early 1900s) pushed against the idea of human evolution as it conflicted with their interpretation of their religious text. They are typically viewed as a minority position in theological circles, however they do have a strong presence in the US even to this day, especially in the south. They were adamant about pitting religion against science. Those who accepted the conflict from the science side adamantly attacked religion which had a track record for being wrong in the case of many areas now occupied by science (astronomy/cosmology for instance) and though most religious sects had accepted the science and adapted their interpretation of their holy text to meet the scientific consensus, this was seen as a weakness, not a strength. Point is, the dichotomy is old and was started, in large part, by religious people who were adamant that their holy book was more reliable than the scientific method.
@@MattAlan01 This is interesting, but I always thought the "opposition model" was promoted initially by John Draper and Andrew Dickson White -- it's sometimes literally labelled the "Draper-White thesis". But as far as I understand, neither of those guys were fundamentalists who were trying to argue that the Bible is more reliable than science.
@@KaneB I'm happy to be wrong, I'm unfamiliar with the Draper-White thesis, but I was raised fundamentalist and spent a lot of time learning the history of the fundamentalist movement growing up (and even after my deconversion) so I likely have an overtly fundamentalist centered view of this conflict.
@@MattAlan01 Your examples are correct instances of where religion has advanced the conflict, but I don’t think it’s accurate to say that religious believers started it, and are the main proponents of it. As Kane said, the “opposition model” was formulated by atheists, and they have a lot of influence from the Victorians
Science and religion both depend on the ignorance of experts. In the case of science, ignorance drives discovery. In the case of religion, ignorance freezes an ideology in time.
I really value your videos. You're the only philosopher I listen to and your work gives me great pleasure. I hope your channel will thrive. Do you suffer from cold at your place?
Wow I got the similar temperature than you, sir Although I was a LOT more substantive but a less pluralistic. And this is all considering I am a theist (muslim) Great videos, though (I am a subscriber)
I would have put myself more on the substantive side. Views of religion that treat it in social/functional terms seem to me to miss what's actually important about religious positions from the point of view of the religious believers themselves. Most religious people, in my experience, explicitly talk about their religious position in cognitive terms. Put it this way: simplifying significantly, we can treat any given religion as involving beliefs and norms. If you remove the beliefs but keep the norms, I'd say this eliminates the religion. In general, I think non-religious people can endorse the norms associated with a given religion, without thereby becoming religious. On the other hand, if you remove the norms but keep the beliefs, you still have the religion. Indeed, in practice, people of the same religion will often endorse radically different normative views (compare e.g. a poor Brazilian liberation theologist with a middle-class American evangelical Trump supporter). If a non-religious person were to adopt the beliefs associated with a religion, that would make them religious.
Thank you ! 18:00 I think one more issue is definitely the plausibility of a soul in modern psychological thought. Once we learned in great detail how specific brain damage can specifically affect certain “soul like actions” like speech, personality, dualism fell out of vogue because it has no similar testable causal mechanism. We can manipulate brains but we haven’t found a way to manipulate the soul. One thing to note is that arguments from reason, identity, etc. have risen too. They’ve been around for a while though, once Phineas Gage was understood it .. became standard in psych books. Of course that also led to Lobotomies but … yeah.
Hi Kane! I really liked the video. A few months ago I wrote you an email about your thesis, but you never answered. Idk if you saw it or not, but my interest in reading your work has not decreased.
I'll admit that the remark about the bible at 57:20 made me seriously laugh, since I can understand the "boringness" of it and I don't think that reading it as you would read a 20th-century novel, especially as a kid, is very useful, but I don't think that it is very fair in all seriousness to characterize it as "bad" literature: it's just literature that was made to be enjoyed in a wildly different setting than the one you would be reading today. Beside, it's not even all one book, and many book were not made to be enjoyed at all (like chronicles is more of an historical document that was made to "keep track" of a specific semi-mythological dynasty, so it's not to be read like literature at all, or leviticus, that was made more to be like a code of law than a "poetic" book, or many of the letters of Paul, that were more like, well, letters than narrative). I think that even reading some very old "poetic" book like the Iliad a reader today could remain baffled by some parts (like the catalogue of ships). I think that in both cases though, if you approach such books with the rigor they deserve, and also doing a bit of analysis here and there, one can come to appreciate at least some parts of the book. I'll admit I am biased though, since I am christian, and also a fan of ancient history, but some books that I enjoyed in the bible were for example Genesis, ecclesiastes/qohelet, some part of kings, and of course the gospels, but I've still to read the majority of it (and I also have in mind to read the Quran and the apochripha, and the Iliad and Odyssey for that matter). That's just my opinion anyway, other people could also still dislike them even if they do all of this.
After doing the test myself I got like halfway to scientism and I'm slightly more substantive than I am functional. I'm generally not the biggest fan of quizzes like this. But I this one especially feels kind of badly put together. You can disagree/agree with a question like "After Darwin, belief in God is no longer needed" in multiple ways. I personally disagree, but that's not because I think belief in God is still needed but because I think it was never needed even before Darwin.
i just said the same thing, darwin no longer has any relevance even to biology, and as i said even the religious don't _need_ god, and i fail to see the connection between darwin and religion anyway, plenty (billions) of religists are happy with evolution.
@@KaneB I would agree except that the results from these malformed questions are being compiled into “research” by a Christian think tank (THEOS), presumably to bolster their agenda, whatever that might be. I took the rather silly quiz and now feel slightly used.
Just did the test, and its pretty agonising. The idea of these kinds of tests is that they should tease out some actual difference in belief about the world, or actual difference in values. About 95% of the questions though could have been answer in totally opposite extremes by people with just different definitions of religion, faith, or what it means to "believe in science". All of the answers are compatible with all world views if you choose a particular definition, and you can do that even if you limit yourself to definitions that are actually used by people in circulation. For example "it is not scientific to believe in the soul". Do you believe that for something to be "scientific", it must have been repeatedly tested in designs that could in principle falsify it, and scientists failed to falsify it? Is it then not scientific that 1+1=2, because an abstract claim cant be falsified? Or may something is not scientific only if it has been falsified, and so 1+1=2 isn't "not scientific" in that sense. A militant atheist could strongly agree, saying "science has disproved the soul". Another, just as militant athiest, could strongly disagree, saying "Science hasnt disproven the soul exists, so it cant be said to flatly contradict what we know from science. That's the point about beliefs being unfalsifiable though, you can never disprove them and so there's no good reason to believe them even if science cant disprove them". A militant christian then strongly agrees with it, saying "of course its not scientific to believe in the soul, science isnt able to study the supernatural, and a final militant theist strongly disagrees, saying "science has proved the universe had a beginning and thus proved there is a god, and so souls must exist. Science has proven the existence of the soul." If you got 100 christians and athiests in a room, you would find all of these answers. Knowing the answer tells you nothing about how the person sees the world, or science in general. Note that the athiest asserting science has disproved the soul and the theist saying science isn't for the supernatural both have the same answer, but have opposite beliefs about what science is and whether there is a god.
A fun game at best. Entertaining, but somehow trivial. All intellectual endeavor starts with a conception of the world. If that conception is not aligned with the world as it truly is, it fails to enable, or even allow, proper examination of the world. By proper I mean, in a manner that gives true knowledge of the discretely objective world. For instance, > the ancients and pagans generally entertained fictitious occasionalist (look it up) gods contained by the cosmos that were fickle derivations of man at his stupidest, even the fates, that seemed to be over them also seemed to be contained by the cosmos. > animists as a type of pagan had gods that were enemies and the world, was their playground: again, fickle, needing to be appeased, usually by human suffering and sacrifice (oops, we do that today with abortion). It was spooksville all round. > Aristotle had a view that made the world impossible to truly explore. > Plato too, for that matter, and the > German idealists more or less the same (we are now entering a time that inherits their subjectivism and undoes science). > Islam views it as subject to a capricious god, making pursuit of knowledge gained by study of the world impossible. > Eastern monism, broadly speaking, reduces the world to a figment, so science is irrelevant, and > materialism reduces it to chance material conjunctions, or 'dirt' for short, eliminating any hope that a mind that resulted from such random events would have anything of value to say about anything. Darwin also noted this risk, but he nevertheless went on to undermine himself, sitting on the branch he was sawing off. The Christian understanding of the world is utterly different, and thus underpins the rise of modern science, explicitly. The description of the creation in Genesis 1 and 2 gives us this: The world (the cosmos, really) is separate from God, and brought into existence with coherent purpose. At the same time God was active and present in the world, as Creator, not creature. The creation described, as analyzed below, was set in the world we are in, indicated by the 'days' of creation. This makes what it teaches grounded in reality: the reality that we are in and have intellectual access to. The 'creation' is not off in some silly-ville of paganism or fantasy; it was located concretely in the history we are in and so its characteristics were definitive for us. Its creation showed rational causality and propositional (intelligible) content, with a clear dependency sequence, starting with the general energy field (light), each day's action rejecting 'chance' and showing its own teleological arc. Something NDE fails in at every point. It shows that we, created 'like' the creator, are able to correspondingly (or conjointly) examine the world which we are to rightly govern/subdue/superintend/steward (none of which means 'exploit', degrade or destroy), gain knowledge and convert this to communicable and intelligible propositions. The basis for this is a confidence in the constancy of the world at some level, regularity and rationality of material processes, and reliability of our cognitive faculties to understand the world as deeply as we can go. There is no limit because we are confident that the world is entirely explicable. A 'designed' world encourages this, a random world jeopardizes the project before it starts. This mission is encouraged because we are also confident that we have a purposeful role in the purposeful world: we have an in-built teleological sense that encourages the worthiness of the project. So, Genesis 1-2 is not a science text, per se. Rather it is the text that explains why science is possible at all, worthwhile and within our grasp. It demonstrates this where Adam is asked to name various animals brought to him. Those sitting on the village idiot fence always get this wrong. Name follows 'understand'. Adam necessarily observed, understood, evaluated and classified in one way or another. The first example of empirical science that we have. All other science has followed this pattern.
Yeah, I've read him. His work is covered in a number of philosophy courses. I never found his work particularly engaging and I don't feel like I have anything interesting to say about him.
@Prayer: I used to think that prayer doesn't really make a difference. While I generally assume I know shit, and anything is possible, on this I was not really "on the fence," but was rather "beyond a reasonable doubt" that it was a bunch of foolishness, at best meditative. However, while doing an investigation into something else, I realized that my belief was based on the assumption that there exists a fundamental disconnect that permeates our society (dogma) between what we call "a human being" and "That Which Is" AKA Source, or God, or The Universe, or Whatever you want to call it; the stuff from which "human" (physical body, or "soul," or "intelligence," or whatever it is that makes a human human) springs forth. At the least this dogma forces the assumption that our disconnect from Source is sufficient to prevent certain connections between what we conceive and what we can influence. I think there is a substantial amount of evidence that suggests that there may be a connection between those two things beyond physical arguments (as we generally use the term "physical"). For example, placebo effects, "miraculous" recoveries, and numerous experiments by the CIA or the Nazi's that "we aren't supposed to consider meaningful," etc. are all problematic with a strictly "hand's on" (physical contact) approach to our understanding of our sphere of influence, even in the "physical" realm. It was in digging into such experiments that I began to reverse my beliefs in that disconnect, and realized how influential of an assumption it is. It is a dogma that permeates everything, despite the evidence to the contrary. I also realized (having spent a fair bit of my life in that arena) that no one in science ever looks at that evidence, despite the evidence itself following the PROCESS of science perfectly fine, even if it disagrees with the dogma of science. I'm not saying I have any idea what the truth is about this or anything else, but in doing some digging, I found that there was something there worthy of consideration. There are things there to which we can apply the process of science to dig deeper, and we don't. At the least, I couldn't, using the process of science (or rather my knowledge of the current state of biology/physics), discount it as easily as most suggest we should. And that's just looking at the evidence. Ontologically, there is no reason to assume such a disconnect, and doing so creates a barrier, beyond which we won't explore, just like all other forms of dogma.
question 2 is a fine example of what i mean about the questions being unclear, belief in god has never been needed, even if you're religious, so what darwin has to do with the idea i don't know, we have come a long way since darwin, it's kind of a stupid question to be asking, like after buggies is belief in god needed? what have the two in common?
@@KaneB Maurice Merleau-Ponty would disagree. Sensory experience as the sole source of knowledge fails to account the subjective dimensions of experience and the role of the individual in shaping and interpreting the world. The structure of of experience is not simply a reflection of the external world, but is shaped by the individuals body, perception, and consciousness. A purely quantitative approach to understanding the world and reality fails to capture the complexity and richness of the human experience. Do not disembody human experience from reality. Embodied experience matters.
@@MetricsOfMeaning That is not, in my view, the best way of understanding empiricism. As I see it, empiricism as a tradition is fundamentally concerned with resisting explanation-by-postulation: that is, explaining the success of various practices by postulating things beyond what are manifest in experience. For example, consider how some moral realists might explain ethical practices as delivering true descriptions of non-natural moral values; they treat ethics as successful insofar as it correctly describes such non-natural properties. Or how some philosophers explain the success of mathematics by postulating a Platonic realm of numbers and other mathematical objects. Empiricism involves resistance to this kind of metaphysical theorizing. This is why empiricists place such significance on sensory experience. (This is a somewhat idiosyncratic view of empiricism, but I think this approach is what actually unifies all the people who are traditionally labelled "empiricist". I agree with Bas Van Fraassen that empiricism is more a stance than a belief.) So I don't see phenomenology as contrary to empiricism, actually. Admittedly, I'm not much familiar with Merleau-Ponty work, but based on my vague recollections of what we covered in various courses, I don't recall him in engaging in the kind of metaphysics that empiricists would reject. Having said this, even if you do take the more traditional understanding of empiricism as the view that all concepts are derived from the senses, I don't see why this would commit the empiricist to the view that experience is simply a reflection of the external world. Indeed, traditional empiricists were extremely skeptical of talk of the "external world" -- Hume, Berkeley, many logical positivists... they tended to say that talk of the "external world" is either false or meaningless.
@@MetricsOfMeaning the subjective dimension of experience can be readily shown to fail frequently. Since we have to rely on it, we should have ways to control for error and bias. This of course is part of what impericism is about. Introspective models seem to lean into these biases rather than account for them.
@@KaneB I appreciate the detailed response! Great channel and videos, and my main critique of empiricism is how heavily we as a civilization have leaned into empirical evidence as the end all be all of reality. Empiricism seems untenable to describe experiences such as “ghost limbs” or psychedelic experiences among other phenomena, and I hold phenomenological arguments as superior for prescriptions about human experience an morality, than using empirical “moral realist” prescriptions. I may not be describing my view in the best terms possible and I apologize if this doesn’t make sense. I’m just skeptical of skepticism and empiricism.
In 5) "Science is the only way of getting reliable knowledge"... ...you "completely disagree" with this statement, saying that "science is not even a reliable source of knowledge " ( the position of the "anti-science sceptics"). So, in your opinion, science not only " is not the only way", it's not even trustworthy at all... Then you say, vaguely enough, that there are other "reliable ways", without specifying of course anything about it...🙄 So, we are not talking here about philosophy, only about unjustified prejudices. Typical internetic "anti-science scepticism"...
Can something come from nothing? Fluctuations of zero? I like to think math gives us a window into a mind independent reality. I also like to just think everything is filtration processes and life easily could be formed via surface tension and diffusion. In that scenario, is consciousness just a filter turning electromagnetic waves into the electron signals in our brain? I don't even like answers, just the infinite questions. I'm sad for the far off future generation that has no more questions. Edit: Noah's flood in Christianity leaves a bad taste in my mouth though I must add, is his bloodlust as infinite as his supposed love?
Mathematics is not transcendental, it is a man-made construct. Mystification of mathematics is as lame as pre-Socratic philosophers mystified water or fire or natural numbers because of their abundance.
I feel like so many questions just assume a fallacy merely by asking them; as in, part of the problem is _raising_ the problem. It's not just about finding the "right" answers, but also about asking the "right" questions in my opinion. Currently, I think questions such as "Can something come from nothing?" are just "wrong" questions, and whether math gives us a "window into a mind-independent reality" is just confused.
@@georgemissailidis3160 if I ask 10,000 questions, 10 have to be the "right" questions surely. Brute force tactics. That is a joke of course, and I get what you're saying. Math philosophy needs more attention though. Oxford had a solid course for a while I know.
For there to be fluctuations there has to be something to fluctuate, so it wouldn't be an example of something coming from nothing. I'm not even sure a literal nothing is even a possible state. How could we even demonstrate that something actually came from a literal nothing? I don't think anyone makes the claim that something (or everything) came from nothing.
I was never a traditional empiricist; I'm still inclined to consider myself a non-traditional empiricist. My views have changed over time, of course; the primary shift as far as epistemology is concerned is that a year ago, I saw myself as an empiricist first and my relativist views followed from that. These days, I'd say I'm a relativist first. But this isn't directly relevant to much that I say in this video anyway. I'm pretty sure I would have responded to this quiz in much the same way even when I was more gung-ho about empiricism (and again, I was never gung-ho about traditional empiricism).
Additionally, I'm not sure what you're referring to re "maximally broad and general a priori arguments". Note though that (a) a lot of these are very broad and general statements, which colours my responses, and (b) I intentionally kept my responses brief because otherwise this video would have been about 10 hours long. I have dealt with some of these topics at much greater length elsewhere. For example, re the statement "the dangers of science outweigh its benefits", see my recent video "Anti-Science": th-cam.com/video/ttL5_TFF4EY/w-d-xo.html On bias in science, see my video on inductive risk: th-cam.com/video/YecBcnakxGY/w-d-xo.html I have plenty of videos on radical skeptical arguments and on realism vs instrumentalism, etc. Of course, I do not have any general objection to maximally broad and general a priori arguments anyway, nor do I see such arguments as necessarily in tension with (non-traditional) empiricism.
@@KaneB Kane have you done work on Van F and constructive empiricism? I'm trying to some philosophy vids and find Bas fascinating but not too much work on him and you are very rigorous just curious. Thanks
@@thomasmuandersontheneousul4184 I discuss van Fraassen's epistemology in these two videos: th-cam.com/video/TSYKP6UKpwk/w-d-xo.html th-cam.com/video/jHnx7ddV3fA/w-d-xo.html
@@KaneB Thanks God Will get to them soon Keep up the good work - I'm probably more a realist for your taste lol but you're very fair if tough Continued success
i'm not sure i like the use of the word "scientism" on their graph. til now (i shall have to google it) i had only heard the word used by people who have no iidea what science is even about, used as an insult. and as with all multiple choice questionnaires some questions are negatives and others positives so it's not always clear what is being asked.
religion is a bunk category. Have you not heard? what is a definition of religion that includes only ''proper religions'' and not a bunch of ideologies, philosophies etc.
Almost all categories are vague. But I think a good definition of religion would be a system of thinking or beliefs that entail something about the state of ourselves after death. Even in religions where the afterlife is unknown or possibly non-existent such as Judaism it still involve some sort of claim about it. If you have a set of ideas that doesn't involve ideas of what happens after death then I cannot find any religion in that category. And if you have some sort of claim about the afterlife then it is not something that any religion can just accept. I think that is a good definition
I dont think the ground is clear man. Whether you stand on science or religion depends on the specifics of the conversation at hand. For example science defines things, but definitions run out and everything breaks down at the extremes leaving a bit of faith at the end of many questions. It may not be faith in a god but it is a faith. Many things do well to be explained on simple faced explanations but many come down to personal perception and faith in the end too.
The particular words chosen to express a concept only matter insofaras their meanings are understood accurately. If we say that all things are just faith, this cuts out the meaning of what's actually being said. Science vs religion, in many cases, means a disagreement about epistemology. As far as I know, all epistemologies have assumptions, but that fact is not what's being debated, but rather, the accuracy and usefulness of competing epistemologies.
@@DJHastingsFeverPitch my personal solution to that is pretty simple. I dont care about the origins of the tree. Its still a tree and does the same thing trees do regardless of how deep we dive. Keeps things simple enough for a guy like me
@@Locreai In day-to-day life, I pretty much agree with this. At the end of the day all that matters is what any of this talk about ideas does for my life.
I outline inductive risk arguments in this video:
th-cam.com/video/YecBcnakxGY/w-d-xo.html
The hard problem of everything:
th-cam.com/video/xXyfX4A69AA/w-d-xo.html
Introduction to the pessimistic induction:
th-cam.com/video/6OwjvkeIzXc/w-d-xo.html
On assessing the benefits vs dangers of science:
th-cam.com/video/ttL5_TFF4EY/w-d-xo.html
How can an instrumentalist agree with the statement "science requires faith"?
A tool doesn't care about its user's beliefs, it just either works or it doesn't.
If science is just a tool, that means it can be used by anyone, not depending on any assumptions, let alone faith.
@@СергейМакеев-ж2н I think that there are various global skeptical arguments that are insurmountable. You have to make unjustified assumptions in order to get to the claim that we face particular problems, that a particular tool is the best means for solving those problems, etc. In particular, I find the problem of induction compelling, and this strikes explicitly at the instrumentalist use of science -- its use as a predictive device. It doesn't make any difference whether we go for realism or instrumentalism; a bunch of assumptions are required either way.
@@KaneB "Required" for what? For using the algorithms of the scientific method and enjoying its fruits?
Why would that require _any_ justified beliefs? Why would it require any _beliefs_ at all?
You can as well just, you know, _pretend-believe,_ and you will still get results.
Arguably, even a soulless automaton, not capable of "believing" at all, could still do basically the same thing.
@@СергейМакеев-ж2н Sure, a soulless automaton could perform the same observable behaviours as scientists. In principle, we could enact science without any beliefs about it whatsoever. But then we're not interpreting science instrumentally -- we're not interpreting it in any way at all. And I think in practice, people are not actually like this; when they make commitments to long-term projects, they will cite reasons for doing so. Anything that is offered as a reason for engaging in the project, and indeed any attempt to describe the project itself, will be undermined by what in my view are irresolvable skeptical problems. Shifting from beliefs to pretend-beliefs (or any other cognitive attitude) doesn't make any difference to this.
@@KaneB Well yes, that's what I meant - not interpreting the process in any way at all.
(Though you can "pretend to interpret" it, if you want.)
I guess this comes down to what we mean by "science requires X".
It's a matter of putting parentheses in the right places. Watch:
"(Doing science in the instrumentalist worldview) requires having beliefs" -> TRUE
"Doing science (in the instrumentalist worldview requires having beliefs)" -> FALSE
You seem to have intuitively picked the first interpretation (requiring the scientist to _be_ an instrumentalist), while I picked the second (requiring nothing of the scientist, so long as instrumentalism is "true" in the world he lives in). That's why we came to opposite conclusions.
This test is so simplistic and, in the case of some questions, uses terms that are completely undefined by it.
Yeah, and very often is taking extreme stances ("totally disagree" or "totally agree") without a convincing or plausible justification...
Watching you overthink your way through this quiz has been one of the most enjoyable hours in the last month.
The topics are getting better and better. I really enjoyed this episode about God and Science
thanks dawg
4:05 "I don't believe scientific theories are true, and that's the case even with things like electrons for example. so electrons, unquestionably, seem to play a really important, a really indispensable role in our best explanatory theories, but I don't believe in electrons. I take the idea of electrons to be a kind of useful tool."
A useful tool for what? An explanatory theory of what? What makes the tool useful if the tool doesn't exist in reality? What is the mechanism that allows your camera and mic to record this video to be utilized while not existing? Is the current flow in your electronics not detectable? Do you think your computer works by magically incantations? What is a useful tool which does not exist? What would you possible mean by "tool"?
A useful tool for systemising, predicting, and controlling observable phenomena.
The useful tool is the idea of electrons, the theory that postulates electrons. Ideas and theories exist; I am agnostic about whether electrons exist. See my "Scientific Realism" playlist for an outline of this debate, and the video "Why I'm not a scientific realist" for some of the reasons why I reject realism.
No, I do not think my computer works by magical incantations. I suspend judgment about how things work. I take scientific theories to provide true descriptions of observable regularities, but I am agnostic concerning the theoretical content that explains why those observable regularities obtain. This is just a standard empiricist attitude.
@@KaneB But do you not see the ridiculousness of such a statement. Presumably you also don't believe in photons, and the theory of thermodynamics, and yet here you are using the useful tools of a knitted hat and gloves and jackets to keep you warm. A useful tool that controls observable phenomena means a thing which can be controlled, which means a thing with an identity, which means a thing which exists. It doesn't matter if our description, definition, or visual models of the object do not yet contain all the knowledge will might gain later, all that matters is that we used an existent's identity to produce physical results in the world. You cannot deny the existence of a useful tool, that's a contradiction in terms.
@@ExistenceUniversity Obviously I don't agree that scientific antirealism is ridiculous.
I'm not denying the existence of the useful tool. The tool is the theory that postulates e.g. electrons. I'm simply not signing up for the view that the theory is successful in virtue of providing true descriptions of reality beyond what is observable. This is the attitude that everybody has to at least some theories and models -- for example, we still use Newtonian mechanics in various contexts, even though we no longer take it to provide a correct description of the underlying structure of space-time (it has been displaced by general relativity in this respect). Similarly, idealisations such as ideal gases and frictionless planes abound in contemporary science. It is useful in some contexts to model the Sun as if it were composed of an ideal gas; nobody thinks the Sun really is composed of an ideal gas.
So probably everybody takes an instrumentalist attitude towards some of the theories and models we use. Antirealists such as myself just extend that attitude a bit further, to theories that have not yet been explicitly falsified.
@@KaneB But you are fundamentally incorrect in your argument here. Newtonian gravitational theory is not dismissed. It works because it is true. It doesn't work for orbits like Mercury, but it works for rockets to the moon. Einstein's GR added to knowledge, it did not make Newton wrong. No scientist thinks that Newtonian mechanics is wrong today just because we have a second set of laws that fix the minor issues at the periphery. You are tossing the baby out with the bathwater.
None of this changes the fact that the electron must be something in order to do something. Non-things cannot do things. It must be something.
@@ExistenceUniversity Newtonian mechanics is no longer taken to provide a correct description of the underlying structure of space-time. Nobody is denying that Newtonian mechanics "works" in various contexts. Obviously it works; that was why I used it as an example. It's an extremely powerful tool for predicting and controlling particular classes of observable, despite its errors.
I don't claim that electrons do anything. Theories that postulate electrons are used by us to do various things, and theories that postulate electrons do exist. I'm not sure why I have to keep repeating this. You do understand the distinction between "X" and "theory that postulates X", right? Or do I need to explain that?
Brother, i want to send you the link of a book on vedic philosophy.
I think science vs religion is a weird dichotomy. I don't see why many believe they are inherently in opposition of each other. Statistically speaking, the majority of scientists are/were religious, and it's not like every theologian in the world rejects science and scientific claims.
I understand the motivation for the opposition view: most religions make various claims about the world that are incompatible with the stories given in our accepted scientific theories. Historically, there have been prominent cases where these religious claims were seen as particularly important aspects of the religious worldview at the time, so their refutation was taken as a threat to the religion as a whole. Having said this, I think it's a massive simplification -- indeed, outright misleading -- to present science and religion as locked in endless conflict.
The dichotomy was created by the religious, for the most part (at least in the US). It was with cases like the Scopes trial (1925) where Christian fundamentalists (a movement in the late 1800s-early 1900s) pushed against the idea of human evolution as it conflicted with their interpretation of their religious text. They are typically viewed as a minority position in theological circles, however they do have a strong presence in the US even to this day, especially in the south. They were adamant about pitting religion against science. Those who accepted the conflict from the science side adamantly attacked religion which had a track record for being wrong in the case of many areas now occupied by science (astronomy/cosmology for instance) and though most religious sects had accepted the science and adapted their interpretation of their holy text to meet the scientific consensus, this was seen as a weakness, not a strength. Point is, the dichotomy is old and was started, in large part, by religious people who were adamant that their holy book was more reliable than the scientific method.
@@MattAlan01 This is interesting, but I always thought the "opposition model" was promoted initially by John Draper and Andrew Dickson White -- it's sometimes literally labelled the "Draper-White thesis". But as far as I understand, neither of those guys were fundamentalists who were trying to argue that the Bible is more reliable than science.
@@KaneB I'm happy to be wrong, I'm unfamiliar with the Draper-White thesis, but I was raised fundamentalist and spent a lot of time learning the history of the fundamentalist movement growing up (and even after my deconversion) so I likely have an overtly fundamentalist centered view of this conflict.
@@MattAlan01 Your examples are correct instances of where religion has advanced the conflict, but I don’t think it’s accurate to say that religious believers started it, and are the main proponents of it. As Kane said, the “opposition model” was formulated by atheists, and they have a lot of influence from the Victorians
Science and religion both depend on the ignorance of experts. In the case of science, ignorance drives discovery. In the case of religion, ignorance freezes an ideology in time.
I really value your videos. You're the only philosopher I listen to and your work gives me great pleasure. I hope your channel will thrive.
Do you suffer from cold at your place?
Thank you!
And yes, still pretty cold unfortunately.
Humidity is my only religion
are you more of an absolute humidity or relative humidity guy?
Humemidity
@@justus4684 yo that's what I am taking about, I just prefer the word Humidity
@@KaneB idk never decided between them
Are you a plant
Do you have any opinion on C.S. Peirce’s philosophy?
Wow I got the similar temperature than you, sir
Although I was a LOT more substantive but a less pluralistic.
And this is all considering I am a theist (muslim)
Great videos, though (I am a subscriber)
I would have put myself more on the substantive side. Views of religion that treat it in social/functional terms seem to me to miss what's actually important about religious positions from the point of view of the religious believers themselves. Most religious people, in my experience, explicitly talk about their religious position in cognitive terms.
Put it this way: simplifying significantly, we can treat any given religion as involving beliefs and norms. If you remove the beliefs but keep the norms, I'd say this eliminates the religion. In general, I think non-religious people can endorse the norms associated with a given religion, without thereby becoming religious. On the other hand, if you remove the norms but keep the beliefs, you still have the religion. Indeed, in practice, people of the same religion will often endorse radically different normative views (compare e.g. a poor Brazilian liberation theologist with a middle-class American evangelical Trump supporter). If a non-religious person were to adopt the beliefs associated with a religion, that would make them religious.
Dude, is your heat turned off?
yeah, we're trying to save money
@@KaneB Ok, I'm gonna do a Hume level. I appreciate your work.
Thank you !
18:00 I think one more issue is definitely the plausibility of a soul in modern psychological thought. Once we learned in great detail how specific brain damage can specifically affect certain “soul like actions” like speech, personality, dualism fell out of vogue because it has no similar testable causal mechanism.
We can manipulate brains but we haven’t found a way to manipulate the soul. One thing to note is that arguments from reason, identity, etc. have risen too. They’ve been around for a while though, once Phineas Gage was understood it .. became standard in psych books. Of course that also led to Lobotomies but … yeah.
Why should I choose only one
Hi Kane! I really liked the video. A few months ago I wrote you an email about your thesis, but you never answered. Idk if you saw it or not, but my interest in reading your work has not decreased.
Sorry, I may have missed the email. Re-send it and I'll answer.
@@KaneB Already done. Thank you!
I'll admit that the remark about the bible at 57:20 made me seriously laugh, since I can understand the "boringness" of it and I don't think that reading it as you would read a 20th-century novel, especially as a kid, is very useful, but I don't think that it is very fair in all seriousness to characterize it as "bad" literature: it's just literature that was made to be enjoyed in a wildly different setting than the one you would be reading today. Beside, it's not even all one book, and many book were not made to be enjoyed at all (like chronicles is more of an historical document that was made to "keep track" of a specific semi-mythological dynasty, so it's not to be read like literature at all, or leviticus, that was made more to be like a code of law than a "poetic" book, or many of the letters of Paul, that were more like, well, letters than narrative). I think that even reading some very old "poetic" book like the Iliad a reader today could remain baffled by some parts (like the catalogue of ships). I think that in both cases though, if you approach such books with the rigor they deserve, and also doing a bit of analysis here and there, one can come to appreciate at least some parts of the book. I'll admit I am biased though, since I am christian, and also a fan of ancient history, but some books that I enjoyed in the bible were for example Genesis, ecclesiastes/qohelet, some part of kings, and of course the gospels, but I've still to read the majority of it (and I also have in mind to read the Quran and the apochripha, and the Iliad and Odyssey for that matter). That's just my opinion anyway, other people could also still dislike them even if they do all of this.
After doing the test myself I got like halfway to scientism and I'm slightly more substantive than I am functional.
I'm generally not the biggest fan of quizzes like this. But I this one especially feels kind of badly put together. You can disagree/agree with a question like "After Darwin, belief in God is no longer needed" in multiple ways. I personally disagree, but that's not because I think belief in God is still needed but because I think it was never needed even before Darwin.
>> I'm generally not the biggest fan of quizzes like this
well yeah, obviously they're bullshit. but they're fun bullshit.
i just said the same thing, darwin no longer has any relevance even to biology, and as i said even the religious don't _need_ god, and i fail to see the connection between darwin and religion anyway, plenty (billions) of religists are happy with evolution.
@@KaneB I would agree except that the results from these malformed questions are being compiled into “research” by a Christian think tank (THEOS), presumably to bolster their agenda, whatever that might be. I took the rather silly quiz and now feel slightly used.
Just did the test, and its pretty agonising. The idea of these kinds of tests is that they should tease out some actual difference in belief about the world, or actual difference in values. About 95% of the questions though could have been answer in totally opposite extremes by people with just different definitions of religion, faith, or what it means to "believe in science". All of the answers are compatible with all world views if you choose a particular definition, and you can do that even if you limit yourself to definitions that are actually used by people in circulation.
For example "it is not scientific to believe in the soul". Do you believe that for something to be "scientific", it must have been repeatedly tested in designs that could in principle falsify it, and scientists failed to falsify it? Is it then not scientific that 1+1=2, because an abstract claim cant be falsified? Or may something is not scientific only if it has been falsified, and so 1+1=2 isn't "not scientific" in that sense.
A militant atheist could strongly agree, saying "science has disproved the soul". Another, just as militant athiest, could strongly disagree, saying "Science hasnt disproven the soul exists, so it cant be said to flatly contradict what we know from science. That's the point about beliefs being unfalsifiable though, you can never disprove them and so there's no good reason to believe them even if science cant disprove them". A militant christian then strongly agrees with it, saying "of course its not scientific to believe in the soul, science isnt able to study the supernatural, and a final militant theist strongly disagrees, saying "science has proved the universe had a beginning and thus proved there is a god, and so souls must exist. Science has proven the existence of the soul."
If you got 100 christians and athiests in a room, you would find all of these answers. Knowing the answer tells you nothing about how the person sees the world, or science in general. Note that the athiest asserting science has disproved the soul and the theist saying science isn't for the supernatural both have the same answer, but have opposite beliefs about what science is and whether there is a god.
A fun game at best. Entertaining, but somehow trivial.
All intellectual endeavor starts with a conception of the world. If that conception is not aligned with the world as it truly is, it fails to enable, or even allow, proper examination of the world. By proper I mean, in a manner that gives true knowledge of the discretely objective world. For instance,
> the ancients and pagans generally entertained fictitious occasionalist (look it up) gods contained by the cosmos that were fickle derivations of man at his stupidest, even the fates, that seemed to be over them also seemed to be contained by the cosmos.
> animists as a type of pagan had gods that were enemies and the world, was their playground: again, fickle, needing to be appeased, usually by human suffering and sacrifice (oops, we do that today with abortion). It was spooksville all round.
> Aristotle had a view that made the world impossible to truly explore.
> Plato too, for that matter, and the
> German idealists more or less the same (we are now entering a time that inherits their subjectivism and undoes science).
> Islam views it as subject to a capricious god, making pursuit of knowledge gained by study of the world impossible.
> Eastern monism, broadly speaking, reduces the world to a figment, so science is irrelevant, and
> materialism reduces it to chance material conjunctions, or 'dirt' for short, eliminating any hope that a mind that resulted from such random events would have anything of value to say about anything. Darwin also noted this risk, but he nevertheless went on to undermine himself, sitting on the branch he was sawing off.
The Christian understanding of the world is utterly different, and thus underpins the rise of modern science, explicitly.
The description of the creation in Genesis 1 and 2 gives us this:
The world (the cosmos, really) is separate from God, and brought into existence with coherent purpose. At the same time God was active and present in the world, as Creator, not creature. The creation described, as analyzed below, was set in the world we are in, indicated by the 'days' of creation. This makes what it teaches grounded in reality: the reality that we are in and have intellectual access to. The 'creation' is not off in some silly-ville of paganism or fantasy; it was located concretely in the history we are in and so its characteristics were definitive for us.
Its creation showed rational causality and propositional (intelligible) content, with a clear dependency sequence, starting with the general energy field (light), each day's action rejecting 'chance' and showing its own teleological arc. Something NDE fails in at every point.
It shows that we, created 'like' the creator, are able to correspondingly (or conjointly) examine the world which we are to rightly govern/subdue/superintend/steward (none of which means 'exploit', degrade or destroy), gain knowledge and convert this to communicable and intelligible propositions.
The basis for this is a confidence in the constancy of the world at some level, regularity and rationality of material processes, and reliability of our cognitive faculties to understand the world as deeply as we can go. There is no limit because we are confident that the world is entirely explicable. A 'designed' world encourages this, a random world jeopardizes the project before it starts.
This mission is encouraged because we are also confident that we have a purposeful role in the purposeful world: we have an in-built teleological sense that encourages the worthiness of the project.
So, Genesis 1-2 is not a science text, per se. Rather it is the text that explains why science is possible at all, worthwhile and within our grasp.
It demonstrates this where Adam is asked to name various animals brought to him. Those sitting on the village idiot fence always get this wrong. Name follows 'understand'. Adam necessarily observed, understood, evaluated and classified in one way or another. The first example of empirical science that we have. All other science has followed this pattern.
what do you think of kant? have you read him?
Yeah, I've read him. His work is covered in a number of philosophy courses. I never found his work particularly engaging and I don't feel like I have anything interesting to say about him.
@@KaneB who do you think is the best philosopher? by best, i mean whose ideas sound most true
@@ctoan_ David Hume
Paul Feyerabend
Bas Van Fraassen
@@KaneB Paul Feyerabend 💪💪💪💪 anything goes!
@Prayer:
I used to think that prayer doesn't really make a difference. While I generally assume I know shit, and anything is possible, on this I was not really "on the fence," but was rather "beyond a reasonable doubt" that it was a bunch of foolishness, at best meditative. However, while doing an investigation into something else, I realized that my belief was based on the assumption that there exists a fundamental disconnect that permeates our society (dogma) between what we call "a human being" and "That Which Is" AKA Source, or God, or The Universe, or Whatever you want to call it; the stuff from which "human" (physical body, or "soul," or "intelligence," or whatever it is that makes a human human) springs forth. At the least this dogma forces the assumption that our disconnect from Source is sufficient to prevent certain connections between what we conceive and what we can influence.
I think there is a substantial amount of evidence that suggests that there may be a connection between those two things beyond physical arguments (as we generally use the term "physical"). For example, placebo effects, "miraculous" recoveries, and numerous experiments by the CIA or the Nazi's that "we aren't supposed to consider meaningful," etc. are all problematic with a strictly "hand's on" (physical contact) approach to our understanding of our sphere of influence, even in the "physical" realm. It was in digging into such experiments that I began to reverse my beliefs in that disconnect, and realized how influential of an assumption it is. It is a dogma that permeates everything, despite the evidence to the contrary. I also realized (having spent a fair bit of my life in that arena) that no one in science ever looks at that evidence, despite the evidence itself following the PROCESS of science perfectly fine, even if it disagrees with the dogma of science.
I'm not saying I have any idea what the truth is about this or anything else, but in doing some digging, I found that there was something there worthy of consideration. There are things there to which we can apply the process of science to dig deeper, and we don't. At the least, I couldn't, using the process of science (or rather my knowledge of the current state of biology/physics), discount it as easily as most suggest we should.
And that's just looking at the evidence. Ontologically, there is no reason to assume such a disconnect, and doing so creates a barrier, beyond which we won't explore, just like all other forms of dogma.
question 2 is a fine example of what i mean about the questions being unclear, belief in god has never been needed, even if you're religious, so what darwin has to do with the idea i don't know, we have come a long way since darwin, it's kind of a stupid question to be asking, like after buggies is belief in god needed? what have the two in common?
Jacques seems like a cool dude
5:05
Moore
boooooooo
"force and vivacity" is Hume
@@KaneB
Hand(s)=Moore
Empiricism is overrated
no
@@KaneB Maurice Merleau-Ponty would disagree. Sensory experience as the sole source of knowledge fails to account the subjective dimensions of experience and the role of the individual in shaping and interpreting the world.
The structure of of experience is not simply a reflection of the external world, but is shaped by the individuals body, perception, and consciousness. A purely quantitative approach to understanding the world and reality fails to capture the complexity and richness of the human experience. Do not disembody human experience from reality. Embodied experience matters.
@@MetricsOfMeaning That is not, in my view, the best way of understanding empiricism. As I see it, empiricism as a tradition is fundamentally concerned with resisting explanation-by-postulation: that is, explaining the success of various practices by postulating things beyond what are manifest in experience. For example, consider how some moral realists might explain ethical practices as delivering true descriptions of non-natural moral values; they treat ethics as successful insofar as it correctly describes such non-natural properties. Or how some philosophers explain the success of mathematics by postulating a Platonic realm of numbers and other mathematical objects. Empiricism involves resistance to this kind of metaphysical theorizing. This is why empiricists place such significance on sensory experience. (This is a somewhat idiosyncratic view of empiricism, but I think this approach is what actually unifies all the people who are traditionally labelled "empiricist". I agree with Bas Van Fraassen that empiricism is more a stance than a belief.)
So I don't see phenomenology as contrary to empiricism, actually. Admittedly, I'm not much familiar with Merleau-Ponty work, but based on my vague recollections of what we covered in various courses, I don't recall him in engaging in the kind of metaphysics that empiricists would reject.
Having said this, even if you do take the more traditional understanding of empiricism as the view that all concepts are derived from the senses, I don't see why this would commit the empiricist to the view that experience is simply a reflection of the external world. Indeed, traditional empiricists were extremely skeptical of talk of the "external world" -- Hume, Berkeley, many logical positivists... they tended to say that talk of the "external world" is either false or meaningless.
@@MetricsOfMeaning the subjective dimension of experience can be readily shown to fail frequently. Since we have to rely on it, we should have ways to control for error and bias.
This of course is part of what impericism is about. Introspective models seem to lean into these biases rather than account for them.
@@KaneB I appreciate the detailed response! Great channel and videos, and my main critique of empiricism is how heavily we as a civilization have leaned into empirical evidence as the end all be all of reality.
Empiricism seems untenable to describe experiences such as “ghost limbs” or psychedelic experiences among other phenomena, and I hold phenomenological arguments as superior for prescriptions about human experience an morality, than using empirical “moral realist” prescriptions. I may not be describing my view in the best terms possible and I apologize if this doesn’t make sense. I’m just skeptical of skepticism and empiricism.
In 5) "Science is the only way of getting reliable knowledge"...
...you "completely disagree" with this statement, saying that "science is not even a reliable source of knowledge " ( the position of the "anti-science sceptics").
So, in your opinion, science not only " is not the only way", it's not even trustworthy at all...
Then you say, vaguely enough, that there are other "reliable ways", without specifying of course anything about it...🙄
So, we are not talking here about philosophy, only about unjustified prejudices.
Typical internetic "anti-science scepticism"...
Science cannot give any moral prescription at all no matter how hard you want it to.
Can something come from nothing? Fluctuations of zero? I like to think math gives us a window into a mind independent reality. I also like to just think everything is filtration processes and life easily could be formed via surface tension and diffusion. In that scenario, is consciousness just a filter turning electromagnetic waves into the electron signals in our brain? I don't even like answers, just the infinite questions. I'm sad for the far off future generation that has no more questions.
Edit: Noah's flood in Christianity leaves a bad taste in my mouth though I must add, is his bloodlust as infinite as his supposed love?
Mathematics is not transcendental, it is a man-made construct. Mystification of mathematics is as lame as pre-Socratic philosophers mystified water or fire or natural numbers because of their abundance.
I feel like so many questions just assume a fallacy merely by asking them; as in, part of the problem is _raising_ the problem. It's not just about finding the "right" answers, but also about asking the "right" questions in my opinion. Currently, I think questions such as "Can something come from nothing?" are just "wrong" questions, and whether math gives us a "window into a mind-independent reality" is just confused.
@@georgemissailidis3160 if I ask 10,000 questions, 10 have to be the "right" questions surely. Brute force tactics. That is a joke of course, and I get what you're saying. Math philosophy needs more attention though. Oxford had a solid course for a while I know.
For there to be fluctuations there has to be something to fluctuate, so it wouldn't be an example of something coming from nothing.
I'm not even sure a literal nothing is even a possible state. How could we even demonstrate that something actually came from a literal nothing?
I don't think anyone makes the claim that something (or everything) came from nothing.
@@uninspired3583 people do make that claim though. Some quite rabidly and repeatedly.
So you basically gave up your empiricism for maximally broad and general apriori arguments.
I was never a traditional empiricist; I'm still inclined to consider myself a non-traditional empiricist. My views have changed over time, of course; the primary shift as far as epistemology is concerned is that a year ago, I saw myself as an empiricist first and my relativist views followed from that. These days, I'd say I'm a relativist first. But this isn't directly relevant to much that I say in this video anyway. I'm pretty sure I would have responded to this quiz in much the same way even when I was more gung-ho about empiricism (and again, I was never gung-ho about traditional empiricism).
Additionally, I'm not sure what you're referring to re "maximally broad and general a priori arguments". Note though that (a) a lot of these are very broad and general statements, which colours my responses, and (b) I intentionally kept my responses brief because otherwise this video would have been about 10 hours long. I have dealt with some of these topics at much greater length elsewhere. For example, re the statement "the dangers of science outweigh its benefits", see my recent video "Anti-Science":
th-cam.com/video/ttL5_TFF4EY/w-d-xo.html
On bias in science, see my video on inductive risk:
th-cam.com/video/YecBcnakxGY/w-d-xo.html
I have plenty of videos on radical skeptical arguments and on realism vs instrumentalism, etc.
Of course, I do not have any general objection to maximally broad and general a priori arguments anyway, nor do I see such arguments as necessarily in tension with (non-traditional) empiricism.
@@KaneB Kane have you done work on Van F and constructive empiricism? I'm trying to some philosophy vids and find Bas fascinating but not too much work on him and you are very rigorous just curious. Thanks
@@thomasmuandersontheneousul4184 I discuss van Fraassen's epistemology in these two videos:
th-cam.com/video/TSYKP6UKpwk/w-d-xo.html
th-cam.com/video/jHnx7ddV3fA/w-d-xo.html
@@KaneB Thanks God
Will get to them soon
Keep up the good work - I'm probably more a realist for your taste lol but you're very fair if tough
Continued success
i'm not sure i like the use of the word "scientism" on their graph. til now (i shall have to google it) i had only heard the word used by people who have no iidea what science is even about, used as an insult. and as with all multiple choice questionnaires some questions are negatives and others positives so it's not always clear what is being asked.
Gender Test 2.0
religion is a bunk category. Have you not heard?
what is a definition of religion that includes only ''proper religions'' and not a bunch of ideologies, philosophies etc.
common sense
Almost all categories are vague. But I think a good definition of religion would be a system of thinking or beliefs that entail something about the state of ourselves after death. Even in religions where the afterlife is unknown or possibly non-existent such as Judaism it still involve some sort of claim about it. If you have a set of ideas that doesn't involve ideas of what happens after death then I cannot find any religion in that category. And if you have some sort of claim about the afterlife then it is not something that any religion can just accept. I think that is a good definition
I dont think the ground is clear man. Whether you stand on science or religion depends on the specifics of the conversation at hand. For example science defines things, but definitions run out and everything breaks down at the extremes leaving a bit of faith at the end of many questions. It may not be faith in a god but it is a faith. Many things do well to be explained on simple faced explanations but many come down to personal perception and faith in the end too.
The particular words chosen to express a concept only matter insofaras their meanings are understood accurately. If we say that all things are just faith, this cuts out the meaning of what's actually being said. Science vs religion, in many cases, means a disagreement about epistemology. As far as I know, all epistemologies have assumptions, but that fact is not what's being debated, but rather, the accuracy and usefulness of competing epistemologies.
@@DJHastingsFeverPitch my personal solution to that is pretty simple. I dont care about the origins of the tree. Its still a tree and does the same thing trees do regardless of how deep we dive. Keeps things simple enough for a guy like me
@@Locreai In day-to-day life, I pretty much agree with this. At the end of the day all that matters is what any of this talk about ideas does for my life.