Alvin Plantinga somehow manages to keep a job at Notre Dame, where no one has noticed he's an imbecile. This video is a response to: • Prof Alvin Plantinga o...
(continued from last comment) Cobb, in the movie "Inception" (an excellent film I might add), has a spinning top which topples over as it should in the real world, but in a dream it never stops spinning. Cobb is rational in believing in the reality of the world around him as a properly basic belief in the absence of a defeater. When his totem (the spinning top) keeps spinning and doesn't topple, that provides a defeater for his belief in the reality of his world, and instead suggests a dream.
To me a filter is something that removes things. If you put a filter in your pipe, it is to remove garbage from the water. A coffee filter lets water through but prevents the coffee. Filters are not the same as inputs.
I have yet to hear a single defensible argument. The most recent "arguments" I've had thrown my way all devolve down to "I believe it because I want to" and that is somehow considered good enough.
The "if you are a a naturalist / materialist you have no reason to trust in reason" thing makes no sense. It seems a perfect non-sequitur to me - up there with the classic: "If I buy kippers on Tuesday it will not rain"
"First, Plantinga wouldn't make the inference from people's bodies and their movements to their existing other people." That is amusing in itself. If he was facing a live bear, would he also not draw the conclusion that the bear exists?
Plantinga leaves it to the reader to extract the implicative function. I meant to come back to this today, as I had to sleep sufficiently to complete my examinations this morning. A because A is much like saying 1 because 1 or dog because dog. It is the establishment of self evidence, of properly basic belief, that Plantinga was wishing to get at, although it may be unclear from how he presents it, as he takes his own approach to the whole idea.
"I just did an advanced search for scholary articles cited in the philpapers website and I noticed that Plantinga has over 130 hits." Argument from authority is a logical fallacy.
Very good. So - would you say that your body's ability to process glucose was not predictable from an examination of it's glucose processing facilities?
It gives a noble depiction of Love for one thing. It's in Corinthians. Love is patient and kind;does not envy or boast; it's not arrogant or rude. It doesn't insist on its own way; it's not irritable or resentful; it doesn't rejoice at wrongdoing, but rejoices with the truth. Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. Love never ends. As for prophecies, they will pass away; as for tongues, they will cease; as for knowledge, it will pass away.
But obviously this is impossible. Hence there is no doubt that there exists a being, than which nothing greater can be conceived, and it exists both in the understanding and in reality.
...and then challenge them knowing that you still could have missed something. It makes for better conversation partners and it's more conducive to discovering the truth.
It's so strange. If I pause the video, you look like a perfectly normal and rational human being. But as soon as you start talking, you reveal yourself to be a raving lunatic.
Just because one philosopher gives a critical review of the work of another doesn't doesn't mean that either philosopher is incompetent. It means they're doing their job and engaging in healthy academic debate.
He was being stacked on a wooden pile for a burnt sacrifice. That's how they did things - burnt sacrifices. Isaac was even helping pile the wood, from what I recall. But that's irrelevant really - killing your kid is sick, and he was just about to do that. Not only that, his willingness to kill his kid is held up TODAY as an good example of awesome faith.
I am on your side OccamKant, but I can only talk with you so much. I have studies I must attend to, and continue to expand my own growing knowledge of Philosophy as I journey to better myself and enlighten those around me. It has been a pleasure watching you be schooled by these theologians and myself. Cheers and happy studies!
The person who was murdered certainly had the experience, but the investigator didn't. He came afterwards. He had no experience of it whatsoever, which is my point.
I mean, "either socrates is not mortal, or he is a man, or both" which would imply one case as an immortal man (P and Q is one of the legitimate cases of P v Q).
But it's a stupid point -- it's like questioning the existence of the lion that's about to eat you, rather than believing your senses and getting out of there. All of our experience has led us to the conclusion that our senses are (for the most part) reliable, and report a reasonably accurate representation of the world around us. If our senses were inaccurate, we would die (not be able to eat, or avoid predation).
As a final point - I knew someone who had a psychotic break - or at least, he kind of went bonkers while I was talking to him. it was very creepy - I thought he was just kidding around, but it became pretty clear relatively soon that he was not all there, not responding like a normal person would, and then he suddenly ran away. I found out later that he ended up in the psych ward of the local hospital. Wouldn't you say that a machine that seemed to be conscious was more conscious than a crazy?
There is a huge difference between coming up with the rules of logic, which are an abstraction that everyone agrees with, and "god", which is most definitely not an abstraction.
A priori is knowledge that can be sound prior to experience. The murder is a posteriori, because it is experiential. I completely agree with you that the investigator could not soundly conclude who committed the murder, because it has nothing to do with a priori knowledge and I was saying this the entire time.
I'm unjust? I have listened to that whole video more than once. What part, exactly, did I not play that would suddenly reveal his true genius? I've apparently missed it somehow.
Well, you can't say that B is entailed upon A, and then present a rule that allows for both A->B and (~A & B), which is one of the cases possible via (~A v B)
Yes, which is quite interesting. Something most of us share, at least recalling back to when you were losing your baby teeth. The pain of pushing them around actually felt good. This is pleasure in addition to pain though, as opposed to instead of pain. I imagine anyone who felt pleasure instead of pain wouldn't live very long.
That's precisely how it works. It's the point of the vinyard parable - that no matter how early or late you are to your "conversion", all is forgiven and everyone gets the same reward. The only punishment is for not believing.
I was misunderstanding what we were talking about, as I thought we were speaking of identity, while we were in fact still addressing Plantinga's "because" claim. The way I interpret Plantingas defense is in his use of an unassailable primitive proposition, that is (P is P and -P is -P). There is no arguing agianst this, and I assume he wished to synthesize this wish the characteristic of belief that is (belief justifies itself, though evidence may change belief)
"The fundamental question is how far do you allow causality to go in your worldview?" Not sure I understand the question. What else is there beyond causality?
I completely agree with you on that point. Here is the thing that completely shatters my mind, Plantinga said that had he lived in ancient Greece he would have believed in Zeus... When I heard that my head nearly exploded. I wonder if that means that he is a religious cultural relativist? When asked if the existence of other religions and the fact that he is basically making an argument for all of them to be true, if that in anyway discredits his own beliefs and his response was no.
The idea is that both beliefs are "basic": not the products of an inference or an argument. They're immediate, non-inferential. On the occasion of certain kinds of experiences (visual and, as you say, auditory, tactile, etc.), we just find ourselves believing, e.g., that there are other people. It just happens. We don't reason our way to the belief as a conclusion of an argument. It's not an implausible position. Let alone idiotic.
I suppose it is to illustrate "faith beyond ones own understanding", much like not asking why ones wife wishes to have her body paraded around at her funeral, but simply doing it because it is her dying wish. If Abraham had committed the murder, I would consider it sick, but Abraham was pained the entire way, and according to the story he almost slaughtered his son but was stopped by an angel. It wasn't burning alive, it was binding him and killing him with a knife. Still murder though.
"Regarding millions of beliefs and one brain state, consider a belief to be a feature of the mental state." But it's not. Your mental states change all the time - you don't suddenly forget things because your mental state has changed. You may be willing to alter the truth value you attach to something when your state changes - when you calm down, you may rationally re-evaluate something and decide that you now do or do not accept it as true. But that's not always going to happen....
I prefer to have an object of study before I make statements regarding said object. Lacking, such an object: What do my statements amount to? Thus, I favour empiricism to rationalism. An Ideal (mental) object reveals nothing about reality, although ideal objects can be applied as ways to describe reality from observation of real (irregular) objects. Since my mental models of reality are open to revision, I'd favour relativism to absolutism. I do not see myself as being absolute on anything.
It's not something he said "in his personal life" - it was a televised interview, thus making it very public. This is him speaking for himself, officially.
You're probably right that there is no clear-cut alternative and perhaps my wording was off. It's not so much that we need to find some alternative, and I admit I implied that initially, but that we should not ever believe that our knowledge and language of the universe is a mirror reflection of existence as it really is. We can assume that we are more or less getting closer to an accurate depiction of reality, but that it is overly hopeful to believe that it will ever be complete.
From that report: "Children were asked whether their mother would know the contents of a closed box. Three-year-olds believed that their mother and God would always know the contents, but by the age of four, children start to understand that their mothers were not omniscient." As I said - an extension of childhood parent "worship", needing someone to take care of you. The study even discusses it. Thank you for making my point for me.
Ok, I guess I could have put that better. But most of the time, when I hear the the term "defeater" it's "I believe this, for no reason other than I want to, and unless you can give me a defeater I'm going to continue". Science is of course all about defeaters - when you are proposing a new idea, the first thing you try to do is shoot the hell out of it. I'm just agains the idea of believing something for no reason unless it can be proven false - because that leads to crazy.
In what way, exactly, is "I can imagine waking up in a beetle body" either logical reasoning or an inductive argument? And he hasn't shown that at all. He's shown he can imagine it. What is the difference, exactly, between Plantinga imagining he can wake up in a beetle body and me imagining attacking the death star in an X wing?
No he doesn't. He doesn't show anything. He says that he can imagine A being different from B, and that's it. That's his evidence, that he can imagine it. Well, I can imagine flying on a broom with Harry Potter, or duelling lightsabres with Darth Vader. So what? Imagination proves nothing.
I am preparing a much less emotional video to follow this up with. I realize that it can be hard to hear my arguments through my ranting. The biggest problem with the OA is that it commits an error - the conclusion is supposed to be stronger than the premise. The premise is a conceptual one, but the conclusion is an existential one, and you can't go from conception to existence.
Well, that's a very open and balanced attitude, and makes for excellent mental exercise, but I think I would have to perceive my opponent's argument as at least reasonably good before I try to make it better. If someone was trying to argue leprechauns, or santa claus, into existence, trying to make that argument any better is really either a waste of time or a practice in dishonesty.
The point of such an argument is that God has been present in every interaction that has occurred in your mind, so you have no experience without him being there. That is the argument presented to me at least to the best of my knowledge.
I suspect I have a lot of dislikes for a couple reasons - Plantinga is mysteriously respected, I am not trained in "philosophy", and I use harsh language.
Depends on the automaton. If it's programmed well enough, why not? If you can talk to a robot and it can talk back to you, tell you about its thoughts, dreams, doubts, wishes, why shouldn't that be considered thinking? Obviously I'm not talking about something on the level of Siri, or Eliza, but something that could actually pass the turing test.
Consciousness? Yes, we can observe that, it takes place in the brain. Ditto for thoughts. Pains? Nerves. What red "looks" like? That question makes no sense.
As a Christian, he believes that there will be something about people that lives on after death, and that "something" is usually referred to as a soul. So he believes that people HAVE souls, not that they ARE.
I don't think you're being sufficiently charitable to Plantinga. What he's saying is not as idiotic as you make it out to be. For example, when he talks about other people, he's not referring to the BODIES of other people. He's clearly making reference to the problem of other minds. How do I know that you actually have conscious, phenomenological experiences, as opposed to just being a machine that looks like one? There are answers to that problem, but your dismissal won't suffice.
Yes, you have just described the formation of superstition. We developed science to get us away from superstition, and this doubled or tripled our average lifespan. The false ideas borne of superstition were killing us.
I suspect that people who dislike this video have serious problems facing the cold truth that Plantinga is completely nuts for believing what he believes, and this truth leads to very unpleasant conclusions about themselves.
Distorted by the senses? Interesting. So there is some conduit into the body prior to the senses, and then the senses distort this originally pure input, eh? So we have a pre-sense sense. Never heard of it. Do tell!
