XPost: rec.arts.books.tolkien
From: Taemon@zonnet.nl
On 13-7-2014 19:25, Paul S. Person wrote:
> On Sat, 12 Jul 2014 22:28:13 +0200, Taemon wrote:
>> On 29-6-2014 19:59, Paul S. Person wrote:
>>> On Sat, 28 Jun 2014 19:42:09 +0200, Taemon wrote:
>>>> >>> out of curiosity>
>>>> Well, I actually agree with that.
>>> It's been a while since I read Kant, but do you /really/ believe that
>>> Space is a pre-existing concept that we use to organize the things we
>>> see (sense) spacially, so that we can distinguish between, say, two
>>> otherwise-identical chairs, while time is a pre-existing concept we
>>> use to organize things temporally in order to determine causation
>>> (post hoc, ergo propter hoc)? I thought that, since Einstein, "space"
>>> and "time" were regarded differently.
>> Uh. Not sure? It sounds reasonable (I know that means nothing). I know
>> we regard time and space differently now but that doesn't matter.
> Well, as I understand it, for one thing, they are a unified whole.
> They are not separate things. Nor are they pre-existent concepts.
I agree, but that's not how we perceive it. We don't perceive things as
they are, we perceive them as our evolved brain makes sense of it. We
cannot see spacetime, we have to find other ways to study reality.
That's why Reinen Vernunft doesn't work.
>> And so time and space isn't what we thought, but we still see two
>> different chairs, no?
> Indeed we do, and we also see boats moving downstream. But there is no
> reason to believe that we need pre-existing concepts to do it.
That's true. Okay, I'll stop and try defending Kant. Not sure why I
thought I would in the first place.
>>> Still, he does limit the ability
>>> of human reason to discover anything about God, which I am sure you do
>>> agree with -- along with Aquinas and many other theologians.
>> Oh, I disagree. If there was a God I'm sure we'd have noticed. Let me
>> put it this way. If God exists and suddenly stops existing, what would
>> change? In what way would the world be different?
> Then you missed his main point in what, in English translation, is the
> /Critique of Pure Reason/.
No doubt - I only skipped through the Wikipedia article ;-)
> The main point, the ultimate goal of the
> book, is that human reason can say nothing about God, so all those
> idiots out there wasting time trying should shut up, go home, and stop
> bothering him.
Well now. What a cynical approach! When I say that Reinen Vernunft (I
like German) doesn't work I don't mean we should give up. I mean that we
should use our cognition to overcome our cognition. Pattern recognition,
prejudices, pet theories, cognitive dissonance, fear of death,
superstition, it all gets in the way of knowledge. So we invented the
scientific method, to drag us by our hairs out of the swamp. I think
we're doing splendidly.
"X cannot be studied" is just the lazy way out. It should be "we haven't
found a way to study X yet".
> To answer your question: the world (in the sense of "everything", not
> just the planet Earth) wouldn't exist any more. No, really, even
> Plotinus' The One (beloved by Hegel) has one job and one job only:
> keeping everything else in existence.
Ah, that's the only correct answer if you believe in God. Sometimes
people start to blabber about how people would turn evil.
> And those people arguing from design are saying, precisely, that we
> /have/ noticed, even if some of us are too stubborn to admit it.
I disagree, because we have better explanations for those.
> IOW, whether or not we have noticed the existence of God is, itself, a
> debatable statement. "We have not noticed the existence of God" is
> just as religious in nature as "God does not exist". And the same
> applies to their positive forms.
True, I should have said "The god of the Bible".
That was interesting.
--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
* Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)
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