And also from taking a step that might lead to him being better able to later, after longer practice, being able to have a fruitful discussion of the those ultimate concepts like reincarnation and karma and nirvana. Much knowledge cannot be understood if one lacks certain experiences. To demand knowledge up front without experience is in many fields simply childish. Of course, if is not interested then it is likely not a path that suits him, yet at least. But it’s as if he would be able to understand it all now and that everything should be demonstrable to someone who is both uninterested and has no experience.
Still, the crucial point historically is that the Europeans had in fact arrived; and while that may well have been difficult to demonstrate at the very beginning, how easily might it have been in the years that followed?
Given for example all the facts contained in this assessment: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_ … e_Americas
Bottom line [mine]: In the either/or world facts are there. But, in a No God world, mere mortals are either able to ascertain them or they are not.
Same with Buddhists and karma and enlightenment here and now and reincarnation and Nirvana there and then. What Buddhist beliefs can in fact be demonstrated about them in regard to their reactions to the coronavirus here and now as that impacts on how they imagine these behaviors will translate into their fate there and then.
Or in regard to any other behaviors in which conflicting goods and conflicting assessments of the afterlife manifest themselves in any particular context.
Exploring that part is either important to folks here or it is not. If it is not, then they are advised to avoid my posts here altogether.
How utterly preposterous! Like if someone cannot actually demonstrate to me things that clearly can be demonstrated – re physics, chemistry, biology, mathematics, meteorology, geology, demography, the rules of logic, etc. – it must be true only in their minds.
Like at the recent Harvey Weinstein trial [in regard to rape and sexual assault] there were not any number of facts brought forth able to establish that which reasonable men and women on the jury were obligated to believe.
But: sans God there are still any number of nihilists and narcissists and sociopaths out there able to rationalize his behaviors merely by shifting the focus of human morality to that which satisfies their own perceived wants and needs.
Then this part…
I will leave it to others to arrive at their own conclusions regarding the extent to which this reveals more about him than about me.
I have my own conjectures of course. It’s just that in the past I would get this sort of reaction from the objectivists. And I always presumed it revolved around the extent to which my own arguments were increasingly chipping away at theirs. They would become ever more perturbed as they began to imagine what the consequences might be for their own “real me” in sync with the “right thing to do” if my point of view actually did make more sense in a No God world.
But KT seems to share many of the same assumptions that I do about morality in a No God world.
What then could be the source of his own fulminations above? Again, I have my own suspicions. And they revolve around the distance between my reaction and his reaction to being a “fractured and fragmented” personality.
But here he has to be willing to bring his philosophical assumptions down out of the clouds and examine them with me given a particular context. Given my own philosophical assumptions derived from the arguments made in my signature threads.
Pick a context Buddhists might all be familiar with and let’s discuss these things. 
Buddhism in the West if often something one comes to post-childhood. One converts to it, or adds it, or moves from not practicing anything to following Buddhist practice. It would be interesting to do a study of what personality types are drawn to which religions and paths and even psychotherapeutic modalities and spiritualities as a adults. And then to see if certain personalities gravitate to an approach for specific reasons and what they might be. Do the people drawn to Wicca have certain traits in common? Do those drawn to more traditional Abrahamic religions - perhaps those who had little or no church (or mosque or temple) - in their childhoods? What is the different in the personalities of those drawn to Hinduism in the West as opposed to those drawn to Buddhism? Those drawn to psychodynamic psychological approaches as opposed to those drawn to CBT? and so on. There are likely better fits, in terms of approach.
What’s the point of bringing this up?
It seems to be an attempt to muddy the water by bringing up beliefs about other people’s beliefs. So it’s no longer what John and Jane believe about immortality and salvation (and the reason they believe it) … it’s what Jane believes about John’s belief about immortality and salvation.
Why stop at Jane? What does Guido believe about Jane’s belief about John’s belief about immortality and salvation? What does Sarah believe about Guido’s belief about Jane’s belief about John’s belief about immortality and salvation?
If anything, it shows the limits of demonstrations. Jane might might describe some event which appears to show that John does not believe in I&S. Is it sufficient? Is it a true account of the event? Is Jane convincing? Is she reliable? Is one or a few incidents sufficient to show anything conclusive?
If you take a gods-eye-view then he either is or is not president. But if you take a gods-eye-view, then there either is immorality or there isn’t, there either is salvation or there isn’t.
The point is that humans don’t have a gods-eye-view and therefore they find ways of dealing with it and one way is fuzzy or multi-state logic.
If I was in a remote region, I might not be able to demonstrate that Trump is president for any number of reasons … I don’t have access to the necessary resources, the people don’t trust me, I’m not a convincing speaker, they don’t understand what a president is, it’s irrelevant to them, etc.
Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.
Totally obsessed with “the optimal or the only rational”.
Okay. So you are saying that it does not need to be demonstrated to you specifically. Physics need only be demonstrated to others familiar with physics, etc.
If someone demonstrates reincarnation to a Buddhist, then is that in the category of “things that clearly can be demonstrated”?
And, of course, there MUST be a category of being agnostic - not just in relation to the existence of a deity, but in relation to a broad category of beliefs. A Buddhist has undergone a long training program with disciplined practice. This leads to experiences and understandings. Iambiguous cannot evaluate how that expertise and different experiences might warrent conclusions in that discussion. But he can admit that there may well be a demonstration.
In his world there is ‘in your mind’
or
that which can be demonstrated to all rational people.
That is binary, as we’ve pointed out. We are now adding that particular experiences and expertise may mean that some can be demonstrated to and others cannot. And then one MUST also recognize that others my have strong rational justification for believing things that they cannot demonstrate to some or many or even all other people.
This does not mean that Iamb must accept their testimony. Not at all. He can remain skeptical and agnostic.
But over and over he presents it precisely as you have pointed out as either
prove it to me and all other rational people
or
it is in your mind only (to give you comfort).
Which leads to him telling people it is all in their minds (and then adding in his faux proviso that it might be true for all we know).
And so he tries to spread his own problems of not wanting to do anything to learn to others. To spread his binary thinking.
That’s why anytime someone challenges his statements he immediately demands that the other person demonstrate the opposite. Which is binary. If I am wrong you must be able to demonstrate to me the opposite is true. That is demonstrably illogical.
And it also allows him to never have to justify his dismissals of other people and their beliefs or his mind reading (it is a contraption to comfort you).
He is immaculate in his schema.
And when really pressed he defends all this malarchy with
people know what I am like unless they are new.
IOW i don’t have to be respectful or make sense, cause people know i am not these things.
Well, then. He knows what we are like. He can ignore us also if he wants.
This is another gods-eye-view. Looking back into the past, you have knowledge and certainty that was not available at the time of the incident.
IAMB IS AN ASS…HERE’S WHY.
Right he would have been telling the tribe that either Xanti can demonstrate it to all of their satisfaction in the tribe or it is ‘in his head’. Two, for some tribes it might have been decades or lifetimes - like say with the Vikings on Newfoundland.
He’s ignoring the fact that in that particular case there was a delay of X length, but in other cases, there might be a vastly longer delay.
I doubt he wants to deal with the rape victim example, where people can know things happened, but cannot demonstrate it.
And at what point in the delay does he think we are in RIGHT NOW.
All things that are true will be shown to all rational people to be true within…what 10 years, 15 years…How long is he asserting?
Well, he’s not. Because he never thinks through the implications of his own assumptions. We have to point them out. As a rule. Then he counters, while never admitting or conceding a damn thing, with more assumptions. We have to keep pointing up new assumptions, since he never concedes anything, just comes with more.
He can’t take one moment to take responsibility for his own arguments, to wonder over them a bit. So, he creates vast amounts of work for other people.
And then there are situations where expertise mean that other observers will not have it demonstrated for them: the example of rogue waves. Now we are dealing with very long period of time where seafaring humans enountered huge solitary waves in otherwise relatively calm seas. There was no way to demonstrate this to all rational people. And once science arose, after centuries and centuries of reporting these ANOMOLOUS but real phenomena, scientists said the seafaring humans were exaggerating, hallucinating, lying or letting the emotions get to them, because there was no justification for this in current science. Note: many scientists and others opted to avoid the parsimonious agnositic position, and said the seafareres were wrong. Later technology changed with video cameras that recorded the waves, though it was only when satellite tech got good enough and the scienstists could see the damn things that they went back to their drawing boards.
Not once did many of them consider that given the different experiences they had from the seafarers, the lack therein, they were commenting as if they knew something which they did not. They were not experts and had, like iamb, no experience.
Iamb would have been telling people for thousands of years - before we had tech to prove it - that these rogue waves were all in these people’s heads. And I think in the end that makes him an asshole. Not so uncommon a kind of asshole but our primary example of it here at ILP of this kind of asshole.
Laziness. Not remembering when his ‘objections’ have long ago been countered. Always shifting the onus. Little dramatic playings to the gallery. Not even willing to consider his own behavior and assumptions. Denying he is saying things even when you can quote them. Expressions of incredulity, often where he should have asked for clarification, since he clearly does not understand.
It’s asshole behavior.
Karpel, Calling someone an asshole is a philosophic problem, not a rant problem. I hope this isn’t moved to rant.
In religious matters we cannot understand a thing until we have experienced it inwardly for it is in the inward experience that the connection between the psyche and the outward image or creed or dogma or doctrine or objective teaching is first revealed as a relationship.
In religious matters we cannot understand a thing until we have experienced it inwardly. It’s in the inward experience that the connection between the psyche and the outward image or creed or dogma or doctrine or objective teaching is first discovered as a relationship.
Beyond true and false
Buddhist philosophy is full of contradictions. Now modern logic is learning why that might be a good thing
Graham Priest
Is it one thing to focus in on those things said to be beyond description, and another thing to imagine that your words do describe something you believe but you are not able to actually demonstrate it?
That depends on what you are attempting to describe and the context in which you attempt to situate it. The “soul” for example. We can imagine a part of ourselves that might be a soul if we assume the existence of a God capable of creating it. It can’t be pointed to or examined, but it must exist if there is to be an explanation for a body that disintegrates at death yet attains immortality and salvation on the other side.
You might even suggest that the existence of a soul is “logical”, once you assume the existence of God.
With Buddhism though all of this revolves around another set of assumptions: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anatta
Is this an effable description of the soul? And what is their explanation for those things here that remain ineffable? How then do they account for that?
As for the parts that are not demonstrable how are not Buddhists in the same boat with Christians and all other religious denominations? Are the “contradictions” embedded in “talking about the ineffable” subsumed in the part that revolves around faith?
Only with Buddhism, all of this is that much more indescribable to many because there is no actual God to take all of your questions back to. What then? How does one wrap their head around, say, the universe itself as the transcending font? What can that possibly mean in a way that even comes close to the use of language?
Got that? Okay, if you think you do, bring the philosophy here out into the world of human interactions and make the proper distinction between biological imperatives, sense perception, rational thought, experiences and reacting to those experiences out in a particular world embedded – memetically? – in ever evolving historical, cultural and experiential contexts.
And then tie that into whatever you construe God and religion to be insofar as an afterlife – immortality, salvation – is applicable to you.
There you go…
Western or Eastern philosophy, God or No God, we all bump into the limitations that seem to be built right into the human condition in regard to making distinctions between the effable and the ineffable, the demonstrable and the leaps of faith.
This holds for many secular traditions if not all in one way or others. We learn by doing and what makes sense to the expert will often make no sense to the layperson and certain field of expertise words will not be understood or understood in the same way by each group. Nonexperts can literally not even see things the experts can see. And this is all within scientifically documented secular fields. And, of course, even when experiments or long tradition seem to indicate something is the truth, even in secular fields (and even in science) it can turn out to be false. Also things can be excluded on poor grounds or because experiences differ radically.
And just to be clear, I am not disagreeing, just extending. This is a not a quality of just religious and spiritual knowledge and experience.
And one needs to view knowledge, I think, as an active apprenticeship. Something one does, hands on. You can collect information through a computer screen, but that generally has little to do with real learning, even less so knowledge, and is far away from expertise and wisdom.
You have to get your hands dirty to learn things, especially important ones.
Right. To judge a matter from the outside without as you say “getting one’s hands dirty” with experimentation with it, if that’s possible, is antithetical to science.
Buddhist scriptures speak of the not-self nature of all phenomena. Things to do not possess a self. Nothing in itself contains an absolute identity. This means a rejection of the principle of identity which is the basis of formal logic. According to this principle, A must be A, B must be B, and A cannot be B. The doctrine of not-self says A is not A, B is not B and A can be B.
To understand not-self, consider the concept of impermanence. Everything is impermanent. All is in a state of perpetual change. Nothing remains the same even for the shortest imaginable period of time. Since things transform themselves ceaselessly, they can’t maintain their identity for even the smallest time unit. Not being able to fix their identity things are not-self, that is, they lack an absolute identity. Not having a fixed identity A is no longer the A of the preceding moment. Hence, A is not A. Impermanence is synonymous with not-self. In time things are impermanent. In space they lack a fixed identity. This holds true for all physical phenomena and for our psyche as well.
impermanence is an ontological technicality that has absolutely no existential cash value in the world. it’s the kind of knowledge that would make no difference if you didn’t have it. moreover, you could produce equally compelling arguments that there is permanence if you put some Eleatics on that shit.
name one thing you would do differently in life now that you believe you are impermanent and have no ‘self’. i mean i agree… we aren’t ‘selves’ in the dualistic sense of there being a soul and a body. hume put an end to that nonsense. but how much does getting this concept correct really matter in life? what if you found out you were a permanent, immortal soul that will never cease existing. maybe you’d live more recklessly. okay. but if you weren’t a permanent, immortal soul, and you still lived recklessly, what would that matter if everything is impermanent anyway?
Without the idea of permanence, life itself would be impossible.
Food remains food, shelter remains shelter, danger remains danger.
Not forever but for a sufficiently long time.
“Absolutely”? The principle of not-self brings to light the gap between things themselves and the concepts we have of them. Things are dynamic and alive, whereas our concepts are static. Seeing this can be quite liberating.
Look at a table. Do you suppose the table itself and your concept of it are identical?