People (everyone, not just believers, or skeptics) want proof of ... anything, really.

We may be close, but so far. Keep your eyes & mind open. I know that most of you have been through 'this kind of thing' before.

Believer > Skeptic
Skeptic > Believer

When that 'proof' is revealed, it may hit you like a ton of bricks. Whatever that 'proof' may be.

Still looking for some ultimate truth, JSD?

The_Metatron wrote:

BlackBart wrote:

Evolving wrote:That's when I fell for - the leader of the pack.

Leader? I thought we were an autonomous collective.

You're fooling yourself.

You can't expect to wield supreme executive power just 'cause some watery tart threw a sword at you!

Help Help, I'm being repressed!

Are you suggesting coconuts migrate?

No they could be carried here.

Ni!

JustStarDust wrote:People (everyone, not just believers, or skeptics) want proof of ... anything, really.

We may be close, but so far. Keep your eyes & mind open. I know that most of you have been through 'this kind of thing' before.

Believer > Skeptic
Skeptic > Believer

When that 'proof' is revealed, it may hit you like a ton of bricks. Whatever that 'proof' may be.

'proof' would be a hella gangster street fashion brand. The logo would have to include the inverted commas, of course.

Why would proof make anyone a believer? Proof renders belief unnecessary.

BlackBart wrote:Ni!

Aww. What sad times are these, when passing ruffians can say "Ni" at will to old ladies. The is a pestilence upon this land!

Hey Roger.

Aww I missed this!

IAMinyou wrote:The world you see is not reality.]

Intriguing.

Is the world I hear not reality?

How about the world I feel?

Smells surely? No?

Are all my senses in cahoots with each other to deceive me?

How then do I reliably navigate reality with such utterly unreliable and outright deceitful senses?

Funny thing is, he's not entirely wrong about the world we see not being reality, but not for the reason he thinks. I have a lovely quote I've been saving that illustrates:

Allan Adams wrote:The miracle is not that electrons behave like that. The miracle is that, when you put 1020 of them together, they behave like cheese.

hackenslash wrote:

Allan Adams wrote:The miracle is not that electrons behave like that. The miracle is that, when you put 1020 of them together, they behave like cheese.

If only all electrons behaved like that. Except for the ones needed for toasting, and the others needed for me to be able to eat the cheesiverse.

Indeed.

BTW, I ripped that quote from a truly stupendous lecture series from MIT. Allan Adams is quite probably the best physics lecturer I've ever seen, including Feynman, and that's something. He's really engaging, funny, oodles of daft jokes and anecdotes (his description of Alain Aspect's single electron double-slit experiment is hilarious).

You can find the entire series on MIT Opencourseware channel on Youtube (yes, I know, university of youtube, and all that). It's the 8.04 (Quantum Mechanics) course from 2013, and it really is awesome.

hackenslash wrote:Indeed.

BTW, I ripped that quote from a truly stupendous lecture series from MIT. Allan Adams is quite probably the best physics lecturer I've ever seen, including Feynman, and that's something. He's really engaging, funny, oodles of daft jokes and anecdotes (his description of Alain Aspect's single electron double-slit experiment is hilarious).

You can find the entire series on MIT Opencourseware channel on Youtube (yes, I know, university of youtube, and all that). It's the 8.04 (Quantum Mechanics) course from 2013, and it really is awesome.

Hey, there, hack! Good to see your recent activity here.

Have you written anything where you enumerate your "properly basic beliefs", what might be termed axiomatic in your epistemology? Say, whatever eventually gets to the acceptance of induction and includes it, statements that we just do not purport to justify. One hopes this is only a couple of handfuls at most. Any time you face down somebody who traffics in "fake world", we'll want to ask the same of them.

I'd give my left nut to see discussion here that wasn't just fighting off the inane antics of a MikeL.

Cito di Pense wrote:
I'd give my left nut to see discussion here that wasn't just fighting off the inane antics of a MikeL.

Ditto.

Here, let me start by raising the level of discursive excellence..


Now, let me see...

I'd give my left nut to see discussion here...

...

Aha! Got it!

No you wouldn't!

That'll be 5 pounds, please, and also your time is up!

Cito di Pense wrote:Hey, there, hack! Good to see your recent activity here.

Thanks, brother, It's nice to be back, and it's starting to feel a little like that old, favourite pair of slippers, including that there seems to be considerably more space to stretch than I remember.

Have you written anything where you enumerate your "properly basic beliefs", what might be termed axiomatic in your epistemology? Say, whatever eventually gets to the acceptance of induction and includes it, statements that we just do not purport to justify. One hopes this is only a couple of handfuls at most. Any time you face down somebody who traffics in "fake world", we'll want to ask the same of them.

I haven't but, off the top of my head, assuming you mean from a purely epistemic perspective (watch what happens to this), I can probably do it, although maybe not comprehensively without some serious thought.

1. Assume you're wrong on any given topic.
2. If you don't know why you think something is true, discard it until you can justify it.
3. Don't take anybody's word for anything, mine included.
4. The only valid authorities on any subject are the data.

I could possibly add to this if I found a context to expand it. This is first-coffee exposition, so may not be entirely robust. I should add that these look like they're phrased as words of epistemic advice for others, but they only take on the full force of believe when applied to myself.

I've made a lot of noise over the years about how philosophy is 'the art of learning to ask the right kinds of question' but, in the time I've been away, I've encountered a much better formulation in discussion with a professor of philosophy at a good UK university, and her definition was not only more succinct, it gets to the heart of the matter, by drilling down to what the right kind of question is to ask of philosophy itself: how to identify presupposition failure.

I love this definition, because it strips away all the inane bullshit that ensues when you talk about things like Popperian falsification and takes even that to this one simple statement, or, in question form 'have I identified my assumptions and do they stack up?'

I'd give my left nut to see discussion here that wasn't just fighting off the inane antics of a MikeL.

That's what I've missed most of all. Indeed, I've massively missed your writing. You know I was always a fan of the way you could deliver snark and insults in such a linguistic labyrinth as to leave most readers entirely unaware of what was going on, and without having to engage in egregious sesquipedalianism to accomplish it.

At the moment, I'm scouring for things to write about on the blog. I know I did some of my best writing here, of the cuff, and on shedloads of topics that have never found their way to the blog. Indeed, after ploughing through Mac Ulloch's FTL thread the other day, I realised I hadn't even talked about that on the blog, which is just silly, so that's my next outing, not least because there's new research...

Hackenslash wrote:3. Don't take anybody's word for anything,..

Hmmm ok.

Hackenslash wrote:... mine included.

Hey now, wait a minute. That means I shouldn't take your word for not taking anybody's word which means I should take peoples' word meaning I should take yours, meaning I shouldn't take anybody's word.

Ok, cleared that up.

Spearthrower wrote:

Hackenslash wrote:3. Don't take anybody's word for anything,..

Hmmm ok.

Hackenslash wrote:... mine included.

Hey now, wait a minute. That means I shouldn't take your word for not taking anybody's word which means I should take peoples' word meaning I should take yours, meaning I shouldn't take anybody's word.

Ok, cleared that up.

Ah, you've spotted Arsehole's Paradox, identified by Buttrind Arsehole in the early 20th century.

That's what happens when you naïvely gather epistemic principles into a set.