Posted on 04/06/2005 11:36:46 AM PDT by Alamo-Girl
Freepers began a most engaging dialogue at the end of another thread! It is not only a fascinating subject - it also presents us with an opportunity to clarify ourselves and hopefully help us appreciate our differences and thus relieve some of the contention on various threads (most especially science and philosophy threads).
The subject is knowledge - which, as it turns out, means different things to different people. Moreover, we each have our own style of classifying “knowledge” – and valuing the certainty of that “knowledge”. Those differences account for much of the differences in our views on all kinds of topics – and the contentiousness which may derive from them.
Below are examples. First is PatrickHenry’s offering of his classification and valuation followed by mine – so that the correspondents here can see the difference. Below mine is js1138’s offering.
Please review these and let us know how you classify and value “knowledge”! We’d appreciate very much your following the same format so it’ll be easier for us to make comparisons and understand differences.
PatrickHenry’s types of “knowledge” and valuation of certainties:
1. Revelation: Spiritual understanding divinely communicated.
Alamo-Girl’s types of “knowledge” and valuation of certainties:
js1138’s types of “knowledge” and valuation of certainties
2. Prediction from scientific theory: I calculate there will be a partial solar eclipse this week.
3. Conclusion from evidence: I conclude from the verifiable evidence that ...
4. Sensory perception of something external to me: I see my dog is lying at my feet.
5. Acceptance of another's opinion: I provisionally accept the opinion of X (an individual or group) as knowledge because (a) I haven't worked it out for myself; and (b) I have what I regard as good reason for confidence in X.
6. Personal memory: I recall I had breakfast this morning.
7. Internal emotional state: I feel I'm happy, or I have empathy, compassion or sympathy for you.
Separate List for theological knowledge:
2. Faith: Belief in a revelation experienced by another.
2. Theological knowledge, indirect revelation: I believe in a revelation experienced by another, i.e. Scripture is confirmed to me by the indwelling Spirit.
4. Evidence/Historical fact, uninterpreted: I have verifiable evidence Reagan was once President.
5. Sensory perception of something external to me: I see my dog is lying at my feet.
6. Personal memory: I recall I had breakfast this morning.
7. Prediction from scientific theory: I calculate there will be a partial solar eclipse this week.
8. Trust in a Mentor: I trust this particular person to always tell me the truth, therefore I know …
9. Internal emotional state: I feel I'm happy, or I have empathy, compassion or sympathy for you.
10. Evidence/Historical fact, interpreted: I conclude from the fossil evidence in the geologic record that …
11. Determined facts: I accept this as fact because of a consensus or veto determination by others, i.e. I trust that these experts or fact finders know what they are talking about.
12. Imaginings: I imagine how things ought to have been in the Schiavo case.
2. Sensory perception of something external to me: I see my dog is lying at my feet. I am aware that this has limitations, but what choices do I have? I learn the limitations and live with them.
3. Personal memory: I recall I had breakfast this morning. Same limitations apply, except that they are more frequent and serious.
4. Logical conclusion: I can prove the Pythagorean theorem is valid and true. The trueness may be unassailable, but the conclusions of axiomatic reasoning are only as true as the axioms, which may be arbitrary. Outside of pure logic and pure mathematics, axiomatic reasoning drops quickly in my estimation of usefulness. People who argue politics and religion from a "rational" perspective are low on my list of useful sources.
5. Prediction from scientific theory: I calculate there will be a partial solar eclipse this week. I am not aware of any scientific theory that I understand which has failed in a major way. Some theories, of course, make sharper predictions than others. Eclipses are pretty certain.
6. Conclusion from evidence: I conclude from the verifiable evidence that ... Oddly enough, "facts" are less certain in my view than theories.
7. Acceptance of another's opinion: I provisionally accept the opinion of X (an individual or group) as knowledge because (a) I haven't worked it out for myself; and (b) I have what I regard as good reason for confidence in X.
Cheers!
Full Disclosure: Has anyone heard from shubi lately?
From Kids say the Darndest Things (paraphrase): Art: If you could be any kind of animal, which one would you be?
Child: A Tomcat!
Art: Why is that?
Child: 'Cause that's what my Daddy says he wishes HE could be!
(I bet I know a Tomcat who spent several nights on the sofa after THAT remark...)
Cheers!
The electrons in every iodine atom in every molecule of thyroxine in your body?
For some hazy reason I thought it was only the innermost electrons which "approached" the speed of light.
Would you happen to give some indication of the average magnitude of the velocity vector for say, a 1s vs. a 4s electron in iodine?
And how much does the orbital angular momentum quantum number affect an electron's velocity within a value of the principal quantum number?
Full Disclosure: Don't blame me. I only worked on Born-Oppenheimer surfaces so I tended to ignore minutae of electronic motion :-)
Hi, RWP.
I'm sure you've heard of the neighboring towns in Pennsylvania:
Bird-in-Hand
Intercourse
Paradise
To make matters worse, they are in proximity to Amish territory.
Cheers!
Perhaps it would soothe your ruffled feathers if I suggest people can predict eclipses from a dynamical model as RWP pointed out, but they can also predict them by categorization (e.g. "almanacs" ?) :-)
Cheers!
And don't forget a full quantum description of the cars is currently "beyond the state of the art"--just think of trying to get a complete Hamiltonian which correctly handled all the molecules in both vehicles during the course of a collision--and of course it would get worse as glass or the odd fender flew off during the crash--and positively horrible if one of the gas tanks blew up.
Not to mention the as-yet-unresolved problem of the consciousness of the drivers: which brings us back to the topic of this thread.
Cheers!
In light of this thread, try re-reading his Descent Into Hell and consider the problem of refused knowledge...
Cheers!
Umm, yeah.
They wouldn't have had the fuel if I hadn't stopped by the ATM to get out money to pay for the Pizza I had for dinner. :-)
Cheers!
And then a FREEper who had listened in on the whole conversation added under his breath "...at least PART of the time!"
Cheers!
bookmark for later bump
On pain of being wrong, or at least losing your intellectual pride.
And there are different acceptable levels of error in different activities, depending on the activity, and who else is involved when you make your mistake.
Cheers!
I was figuring about 10**25th.
For each molecule, you need 4 numbers to describe position and linear momentum, another 4 numbers to describe angular momentum, so just given those two attributes we have 10**25**8.
Because a water molecule is V shaped, it can ring or vibrate like a tuning fork, adding another scalar to the equation.
Lotsa zeros. You got the idea.
If a new state of the molecules happens each Planck unit and never repeats, it would take like 10**180 seconds to show all the patterns, this is trillions of trillions of googles times the age of the universe.
Where in the heck did you read *that* into my posts?
- is shared by many though not expressed by many.
It wasn't expressed by me either.
Obviously though, there are many here who disagree with you. I am one.
In order to disagree with me, you would first have to understand what I was actually saying.
If anything, "(1) and (2) [faith and revelation]" were obstacles to real learning for millennia (just as they continue to be in the Muslim world to this day). Furthermore, faith and evelation" led primarily not to "confidence" in the reliability of "the first 7", but to doubt in them -- both because "the first 7" sometimes led to conclusions contrary to the "accepted wisdom" arrived at via "faith and revelation", and because belief in the results of "faith and revelation" pointed towards a conclusion that the universe was *capricious* (i.e., operated at the whims of god), and was not *predictable* (i.e. mechanistic/deterministic enough for constant physical laws and processes to be discovered).
For example, I completely disagree with you on the above and instead agree with betty boop. I cannot speak to the other cultures, but Judeo/Christian faith not only encourages discovery - it demands it by Scripture (Psalms 19 and Romans 1).
That's a wonderfully idealistic and rosy view, but it is quite inconsistent with actual history. My synopsis is based on a long familiarity with the historical roots of empiricism, and I stand by it.
Therein lies the rub -- how, exactly, *does* one separate knowledge from mere belief? That is, how do we determine which of our beliefs are true (actual knowledge) and which are false?
The above is yet another example of your prejudice.
Raising a question is an "example of my prejudice"? Ooookay...
Instead of simply saying "belief" you say "mere belief".
No, I do not say "mere belief" *instead* of "simply saying 'belief'", I said "mere belief" to DISTINGUISH it from those beliefs which are *true*. As the passage above should have made reasonably clear, by "mere belief" I meant, as I clarified in the very next sentence, "[those] of our beliefs [...] which are false". In other words, *false* beliefs are not knowledge, they are "mere beliefs" -- they are *only* beliefs, and nothing more. They are those beliefs which do not reflect reality.
Perhaps you misread my words due to *your* "prejudice"?
And again, in the second sentence, you presume that "beliefs" can be subjected to proofs.
No, I "presume" that beliefs can be subjected to examination and compared against reality to determine whether they are accurate or not. Do you actually disagree with this?
But generally speaking, a proof requires an observer status apart from that that which is being observed.
Irrelevant, since I was not speaking of "proof".
So, go ahead and apply your skeptics' tests and demand your proofs
Sigh. Go argue with someone who actually *did* say anything about "proofs".
- you will never meet God that way and will only estrange yourself from Him.
This is incredibly condescending and presumptuous. Please keep your small-minded notions of how God may be reached to yourself.
In the meantime, your body of knowledge will accrue to the maximum limit of your mind.
If so, that would put me ahead of a lot of folks.
I, on the other hand, will receive understanding according to God's will. My mind will form no limitation to my increase in knowledge according to His will
Yes, of course, your capacity exceeds my own and is in fact limitless. I am humbled. *snort*
With all due respect, you're hallucinating. I have no "anti-Christian bigotry", nor was I expressing any in the post to which you responded. And I hugely resent your unfounded slur.
And do not presume to speak for "all of us" when you are speaking your *personal* opinion.
Furthermore, even if I *had* actually expressed some sort of "anti-Christian bigotry", that *still* would in no way demonstrate either a) that "anti-Christian bigotry" is "respectable", nor b) that it is the "last" (i.e. only) respectable bigotry.
In short, your outburst is wrong on every level.
Personally, I think you should be ashamed of yourself.
Personally, I think you owe me a rather large apology. Or lacking that, I demand that you no longer reply to any of my messages, and no longer ping me to any of yours.
yea? Prove it.
Easy enough: If there is pondering going on, then something perforce exists which is pondering. QED.
There is no scientific evidence that I am aware of that there is "pondering" going on outside of physical behaviors that give the appearance that they can ultimately be accounted for as the summation of physical processes engaged in by individual cells.
Again, this completely misses the point. The point is that *wherever* or *however* pondering occurs, the fact that it occurs indicates that there *is* something, somewhere, pondering. Don't try to make more of it than that.
There is only objective evidence that your cells are "pondering"; yours and Descartes claims are unverifiable personal revelations,
Sorry, but you have obviously misunderstood "my claims".
proffering no more a categorically reliable basis than that of a Holy Roller that God has touched his tongue, or a witch that she has had congress with the Devil.
Let me know when you wind down and return to something I might have actually said.
[It has nothing to do with "a life worth living" or however you'd like to sum up your alleged point in the prior paragraph. It has to do with the fundamental matter of existence or non-existence, and how much we can or can't know about it.]
...according to Cartesians. According to many others, it is airy hogwash and a pointless waste of ergs, trying to imagine that there's a powerful reality-solvent dwelling mysteriously somewhere within you.
Where in the *heck* did you read anything into my post about "trying to imagine that there's a powerful reality-solvent dwelling mysteriously somewhere within you"? You're obviously spoiling to argue with someone about this, but next time choose someone who might have actually made any of the points you're dying to take issue with. I have not.
All this myasmic indwelling foo-foraw is in aid of the Cartesian Project: trying to imagine that Newton and/or Euclid have paved the way for a formally closed, logically demonstrable universe, and that like Spinoza, Descarte is going to be going on from "I think, therefore I am" for a Principia of Morality.
Um, whatever. See above.
I'm sure Descarte was a nice guy, but "I think, Therefore I am", is an utterly useless, uninformative, and rather doubtful construct in aid of a useless, if not dangerous task.
If you're finished, do you have any beef with what *I* actually wrote?
precisely the type of sneering halfway informed pompous crap I have heard a thousand times. Usually from someone who has taken freshman chemistry and read exceprts from Henry Morris (from the skeptic tank..., where else?) and assumes he therefore knows all there is to know regarding biblical cosmology. Gratuitous insults and unbacked accusations only work when you are dealing with people who are confused by what "phyla" means. If you want a personal, up close demonstration of how empirical science is completely baseless as an epistemological foundation, all you have to do is ask. Empiricism is NOT science, and the smarter scientists know that. It is only the dishonest and dullards who pretend otherwise.
You know, the decaffeinated brands taste just as good.
Now, if you're done with your own "sneering halfway informed pompous crap", did you have any specific disagreement with the substance of my post? Or were you just looking for an excuse to make an unfocused rant so you could get it off your chest?
Descarte isn't in the least vindicated. Even if you could prove your "pondering" exists, which you can't,
Sure I can. The fact that it is taking place proves it exists.
why is there any particular reason to believe it is your pondering? Why can't all the manifestations of your pondering that you find so manifestly proving your existence, be the result of some superior being who dreamed you up, complete with your conviction that it must be you who exist, because of your illusion that you are thinking stuff up.
Again, this misses the point. As I clearly wrote above, WHATEVER ITS SUBSTRATE might be -- including any variation on "dream within a dream of a superior being", the fact that thinking is taking place proves the existence of the thinker (i.e. that which thinks). Decartes 1, you 0.
Since you are willing to accept your pondering's supposed existence without proof,
Faulty premise, nice try.
why should I regard the notion that some being thought you and your ponderings (or me and my ponderings) up as any less reliable?
Conclusion based on faulty premise, therefore the conclusion is faulty.
You "forgot" to explain why. Ten yard penalty.
Further, even if you DO recognize Cartesian self-awareness as a beginning point for knowledge,
Not what I did, go take it up with someone who might have actually done so.
there is no escape from solipsism with Descartes.
In principle, there is no escape from solipsism even without Decartes.
He himself recognized that, and acknowldeged that one had to posit a benificent God who had ordered the cosmos to be congruent with our brains (and vice versa) in order to make meaningful statements about ANYTHING other than our own existence.
On that point, he was mistaken.
It is clear you don't understand Descartes.
It is clear you don't understand me.
But it is not wise to swing a club at someone unless you are aware that that very club will wind up taking your own head clean off when you swing it. You need another stick, bubba.
Empty metaphor, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.
DesCartes is NOT your solution.
I never said he was.
Now, would you like to remind me why an empiricist treats the sesory inputs from a cosmos that is uncertain and ordered by a neural ganglia of which he is also uncertain into "knowledge" of which he is certain?
Actually, an empiricist is "certain" of nothing. In another post you snottily implied that you understood empiricism better than most. Your confidence was clearly misplaced.
Is it because some red lights flash on a machine (designed by processes in that uncertain ganglia), or is it because his perceptions of that data are grouped into categories by that same neural gangila and you assume therefore that this has some "real" relationship to the cosmos out there?
No, but that's a bizarre tangent you've gone off on.
On what basis do posit such crap?
I don't, actually. On what hallucination of yours do you posit that I did?
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