Logik wrote: ↑Mon Mar 18, 2019 2:01 pm
Scott Mayers wrote: ↑Mon Mar 18, 2019 1:48 pm
I claim specifically that you CAN know a GENERAL truth about all systems of logic AND all of reality BUT that you cannot determine all SPECIFIC theorems nor theories within a bounded but infinite world.
If you can't use it to generate testable hypotheses it's not knowledge. It's just a logical truism - a tautology.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Verificationism
Verificationism, also known as the verification idea or the verifiability criterion of meaning, is the philosophical doctrine that only statements that are empirically verifiable (i.e. verifiable through the senses) are cognitively meaningful, or else they are truths of logic (tautologies).
Who the fuck says I can't generate a testable hypothesis? You're begging that I can't by your own "apriorism". And given you don't think logic is real, then your apriorism of my incapacity here is also non-scientific because you are just asserting that something does not exist positively simply for not being able to point at it.
I know this is difficult for you to understand. But IF you think that reasoning is not a reality itself, you can't have a functioning brain. The conscious state of the brain, its activity is LOGIC IN ACTION. Otherwise you may as well have no brains as your senses can suffice to 'see', your ears to 'hear', etc, without requiring something to combine these inputs together. You cannot escape the fact that if you sense something, it has to be CONNECTED in some way. THAT connection IS a logic machine.
When discussing 'science' that is only about AGREEMENT between different subjective minds collectively. If I see X and you 'agree', then we can use that as input data to a REAL logic machine to determine or 'predict'. But if you can't believe that the logic machine that connects inputs together to output something novel, they even 'prediction', verification, or anything is moot.
A rock observes in the way you beg we can 'interpret' reality. But how do you think that the thoughts you have are not real in and of themselves as thought? We are bound to our brain's inputs as well as to the logic it uses. Should we throw our hands up in the air and give up?
If you want to remain ''practical", then just be the animals we are and eat, sleep, and copulate. I already know that we don't need even science if we could already get everything we want. We wouldn't even need to have consciousness. THAT's 'empirical' for you.
You may interpret our capacity to think with reason as not a 'real' thing but this reduces to a dualism of mind external to the brain. I say the mind IS the brain when it is dynamically operating its logic gates and trading information from senses to motors and back to sensors again ONLY to feed the collective sack of cells we are made up of. That's it. To me the mechanism of reasoning is as much 'empirically' true as is the data.
logik wrote:
Scott Mayers wrote: ↑Mon Mar 18, 2019 1:48 pm
I don't know if you are religious or not. But I am not. As such, I can't accept a SPECIAL ESSENCE of nature that predesignates 'laws'. Reality must depend upon itself or it reduces to a religious belief. This means that reality has to be derivable FROM itself with some reasoning of some sort. The least possible 'reason' would require one without a reason but is not an 'essence' like some God.
You are missing the forest for the trees again. I am not using "God" to refer to any specific deity or religion. When I say 'God' I mean it in the most universal and non-specific meaning possible.
Any Uncaused Cause you contrive is a God. ANY theory of origin you contrive is a God.
ALL axioms (ASSUMED TRUTHS) are Gods.
Every. Single. One.
ALL epistemic foundationalism is religion.
Given that definition - I am religious. My God is information:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_theory
My religion is digital physics:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Physical_information
I disagree with you. You are merely using the label, "God" as a convenient label of something unknown but asserting it has literal unique properties that obey laws. Where do the laws come from? Why would a special set of laws pre-exist but have no meaning?
My question is to ask that even if there were some "God", what did that come from? If it comes from a 'something' then what does that something come from, etc? You have to assume NOTHING before you can impose something to exist. And if EVERYTHING exists, why would you caveat it with an exception to contain this nothing as a state or reality itself?
I need to separate to another thread because I ended up developing a complete proof of "if there is an origin, then only absolutely nothing is all it could be." So jumpting to the bottom of your post, you asserted,
logik wrote:
Scott Mayers wrote: ↑Mon Mar 18, 2019 1:48 pm
If this is too much for you, then tell me this one thing you believe: Do you believe that there is a real origin to our universe, ....a real singularity OR, as I am saying, only the appearance of one?
I DON'T KNOW. Hypotheses non fingo!
Because I recognize the limits of my mind, I cannot determine which is which!
I cannot disambiguate the following possibilities:
* The universe has no beginning but it APPEARS that it does.
* The universe has a beginning and it APPEARS that it does.
Can you think of ANY experiment where we could distinguish the two?
You cheated in the wording it looks like. It should be,
"The universe appears that it has a beginning but you cannot determine that it does."
How COULD you determine with any certainty of exclusion, that the point at which no time and no thing exists, is either real or not? So no, I don't believe you could find an empirical proof of it one way or the other. But this is why we are left with a logical one only. The options to the singularity to be real or not would require empirical evidence of at least something on the other side of that point existing. If you cannot find it, then that would just prove that there are more points beyond the apparent wall (singularity) but not whether there is never any possible origin by continuing. AND, If you could find it, how did you get there to discover that information without jumping over or through that singularity? Either options lead you to only confirm an infinite possibility is possible but not be able to exclude it for the finite one at some other point beyond it. You COULD interpret is as just another point inside but then we only repeat the thought experiment over again.
Thus you can't determine THAT there is an "origin" or not regardless. So the only POSSIBLE remaining option is to 'test' whether something can be derived from nothing. I say you still can't prove it empirically, but you CAN prove it logically.
If there is a singularity (origin) that actually existed but we didn't know, AND if it were 'something', it would beg what that something is caused by similar to it being caused by nothing. If it is an uncaused something, it is indifferent to being nothing OR at best both nothing and something.
If it is still a something, we repeat the question of its cause and still lead back to it being either Nothing OR (Nothing and Something).
Thus,
IF there is an 'origin', it can ONLY be Nothing by itself uniquely or both. That Totality (the real thing) could possibly be Nothing would make it both and where I think that contradiction is the 'prime motivator' and then would become infinite. To me it is as if reality would 'want' (sorry for the anthropomorphism) to return to nothing but has no choice due to that state being contradictory.