Comment on [deleted]
Juice@midwest.social 2 months agoI’ll try to be a little less obtuse. I thought better about getting into this in the shitpost comm, and since I’m getting massacred my first impulse was probably correct. But I’m a huge nerd, cant help it.
So I guess I don’t know what you mean by epistemologically consistent. As a general rule of epistemology, people can have different, incompatible epistemologies, which basically renders communication impossible, since the participants use different models to determine what is true. This uh happens a lot since people think the way that they determine truth is the “right” one. Even my attempt to adapt different ways of thinking to different situations has limits, since I’m never going to subscribe to like flat earth theory. Not all epistemologies are equally valid or rigorous. Arithmetic is highly rigorous, whereas flat earth has a low bar for proof. Also I’ll argue that the validity of various theories of knowledge are historically contingent. Empiricism isn’t just “more true” than religion because it is more rigorous; in fact the hermetic tradition was extremely rigorous and scientific, but because they viewed “god” as indistinguishable from nature, they could synthesize religion and empirical science without contradiction. Their scientific inquiry was a sacred religious ritual where god learned about its own physical body (nature) through the consciousness of the scientist which was a part of the consciousness of god. This kind of monism is completely foreign to us, yet Isaac Newton was a Hermetic whose theories are still highly relevant and rigorous. But if a scientist publicly expressed these views to the academy they’d be deemed an eccentric, if not a crank of the highest order.
The second part of your question is more straightforward. How would the world change if god didn’t exist the way I described, as being socially real? There’d be no churches, no religious art, no pilgrimages that attract tens of millions each year. There’d be no recognizable European medieval period. Tens or hundreds of millions of people wouldn’t donate their time or money to the church. Which like, wouldn’t that be fucking awesome? no indigenous “schools” no religious colonialism/imperialism.
But all these followers aren’t lying in order to trick you into thinking god exists. They feel god, they experience god through their institutions, rituals, art, monuments, and yes, crimes. This exactly is the limit of pure Empiricism, it forces you to completely disregard subjectivity, or relegate it to a lower order of “realness” than a physical object. A stone in the middle of a lake will have little effect on the outside world outside of its extremely local circumstances; but a religious belief can have deadly implications for millions if it becomes the policy of a government. Laws, money are socially real, determined by their existence on paper, are upheld by sophisticated social constructs that reach into our minds and our behavior. But again, is a law not “real”? Of course it is. Try to break one in front of a cop and find out how real it is.
JaymesRS@literature.cafe 2 months ago
That is tautological and presumes the antecedent. It’s true because they have these experiences and produced these objects. It wouldn’t be true if they hadn’t done that.
I didn’t ask, how would the world would change if people did not believe that God existed. I asked how it would change if God actually did not exist whether they believed or not. 
I’m looking for the major distinguishing characteristic that would differentiate belief in something untrue versus the actual no existence in that. It’s accurate to say that if belief was none existent, those buildings, rituals, etc. would not exist, but that doesn’t distinguish between people believing it to be true yet it not actually comporting with reality.
Those things you mentioned aren’t reliant on being consistent with reality only on people believing that they experience something that is unmeasurable in any actual sense. Our history is full of times where people believed something and developed practices, rituals, stories, and structures in recognition of those beliefs and purported to experience the presence of that belief target only for later peoples to recognize that those beliefs weren’t based on any thing that comported with reality.
Juice@midwest.social 2 months ago
But your problems with my explanation depend on a view of reality that is completely divorced from time. Your conditions for realness depend on the existence of a real physical object and reject socially contingent objects, which is your right, but this is an example of an epistemological crisis: I insist that things that are socially real are real; you deny their existence, also denying the existence of law, value, many things that our society depends on. If you pick out parts of my argument that you don’t like and act like the points that I did make just don’t exist, then you are making your argument based on willful ignorance. But besides that, if your standard for what is real differs from mine we cant even have a debate, we just talk past each other smugly assuring ourselves that we are correct because our opponent is just like stupid or something. Maybe you think I’m stupid, I don’t think you’re stupid. My point is you can’t just deny the existence of things that are real in every way but physically. If a huge proportion of people in a society believe that something is real it is the same as that thing being empirically real. You can’t just throw away thousands of years of history because it disagrees with your narrow definition of objectivity. Or I guess you can, none is stopping you, but don’t pretend its consistent with reality.
JaymesRS@literature.cafe 2 months ago
Except things like law exist in a measurable state. Violating a law has a measurable outcome in the physical world. That’s the difference. If you run a stop sign in the presence of observers such as a police officer (such that it has an impact on that observer) you will be issued a citation for violating that law. We can test that hypothesis.
If something has no measurable presence under any observable state it is indistinguishable from that which does not exist. And to assume it does is tautological and a fallacy.
Juice@midwest.social 2 months ago
well im not a philosophy professor, and ive done my level best to explain basic humanities concepts to you. its funny because i used to make these exact same arguments that you are, and my understanding was incomplete, as it still is. i hope you dont have it figured out as much as you think you do, because then you’ll likely not grow as a person. In any case I’ve made long arguments as well as I can make them. Thanks for the discussion