A belief that is not consonant with the experience of the believer, since when we choose fundamental axioms, we have only our own experience to rely on.
Why would you take on as an axiom something that could usefully be compared to experience? Surely we only make an axiom of something when we need it in order to build other beliefs from experience?
The time I became an atheist as a teenager, yes
That one is less surprising - I was kind of thinking of, well, all the other times :-)
The mental gymnastics I had to do to keep ignoring my perception of the divine were driving me insane.
Now that's something that I think we could usefully discuss - though I think the phrase "account for" would be fairer than "ignore". We know that not all sensation is externally generated - if we hear a ringing sound, is a bell ringing, or do I have tinitus? If we put everything on one side or the other we just destroy the meaning of the distinction, so we need some reasonable, empirical way to make the distinction.
At this point, all I can say is that I don't think you understand epistemology as well as you think you do. I wish I could introduce you to my metaphysics supervisor (no longer alive, sadly).
I don't think of myself as an expert in epistemology, and I'm happy to be shot down on this one if I learn from the experience. Any pointers you can give would be gratefully received, especially if they don't involve spending any money...
I think you'll have to let me judge what are satisfactory levels of sense for me. Making a cup of tea was certainly still possible, but it required far more spoons because of the effort of ignoring things that seem to me more real than the cup and the tea in order to reach past them to manipulate the less-real things.
This still seems to be an experiential argument for God, isn't that inconsistent with your axiomatic approach?
God, to me, is not less ordinary than the tea.
I should have stuck with "prosaic" - dark matter is more ordinary than tea in the sense that there's lots of it, but from where I'm sitting it's a lot less prosaic.
If I say "better not spill this tea, it'll stain the carpet", practically everyone will feel they understand what I mean, and be able to follow and verify my chain of reasoning trivially.
Edited for typo
Er, I edited my earlier response for meaning and didn't flag it up...
no subject
A belief that is not consonant with the experience of the believer, since when we choose fundamental axioms, we have only our own experience to rely on.
Why would you take on as an axiom something that could usefully be compared to experience? Surely we only make an axiom of something when we need it in order to build other beliefs from experience?
The time I became an atheist as a teenager, yes
That one is less surprising - I was kind of thinking of, well, all the other times :-)
The mental gymnastics I had to do to keep ignoring my perception of the divine were driving me insane.
Now that's something that I think we could usefully discuss - though I think the phrase "account for" would be fairer than "ignore". We know that not all sensation is externally generated - if we hear a ringing sound, is a bell ringing, or do I have tinitus? If we put everything on one side or the other we just destroy the meaning of the distinction, so we need some reasonable, empirical way to make the distinction.
At this point, all I can say is that I don't think you understand epistemology as well as you think you do. I wish I could introduce you to my metaphysics supervisor (no longer alive, sadly).
I don't think of myself as an expert in epistemology, and I'm happy to be shot down on this one if I learn from the experience. Any pointers you can give would be gratefully received, especially if they don't involve spending any money...
I think you'll have to let me judge what are satisfactory levels of sense for me. Making a cup of tea was certainly still possible, but it required far more spoons because of the effort of ignoring things that seem to me more real than the cup and the tea in order to reach past them to manipulate the less-real things.
This still seems to be an experiential argument for God, isn't that inconsistent with your axiomatic approach?
God, to me, is not less ordinary than the tea.
I should have stuck with "prosaic" - dark matter is more ordinary than tea in the sense that there's lots of it, but from where I'm sitting it's a lot less prosaic.
If I say "better not spill this tea, it'll stain the carpet", practically everyone will feel they understand what I mean, and be able to follow and verify my chain of reasoning trivially.
Edited for typo
Er, I edited my earlier response for meaning and didn't flag it up...