BigMike wrote: ↑Thu Nov 07, 2024 7:03 pm
But here’s the thing: while I can appreciate the significance of those core beliefs, in science and rational inquiry, the “primary thing” isn’t a belief or subjective feeling—it’s evidence and logical consistency. When we step outside of that framework, we enter a realm where personal conviction, however powerful, takes precedence over shared, testable reality. That’s a world where each person’s truth can be as valid as any other’s, even when they’re contradictory, which is fascinating but doesn’t leave us with much common ground for rational debate.
So if this is about each of us recognizing the beliefs that guide us, fair enough. But if we’re looking for a shared path forward, I’d say we need to keep one foot firmly planted in the tangible, evidence-based world we can all observe and verify.
Myself, I have already been through the thought processes, and the realization processes, that this topic evokes. What I believe that you are doing is *working* a specific angle through a scientific, and
scientistic perspective that involves a materialistic general interpretation of the nature of things in what Caryle describes as
this mysterious universe.
My understanding is that a materialistic perspective has astounding validity and relevance within specific domains. Yet I do not think it has any way at all to address, nor to be concerned about, the range of issues for which religions, speaking generally, are concerned. So, and this I already pointed out, I believe that you have established for yourself an absolutist conceptual domain that operates like an intellectual mechanism and which strangely, and ironically, mirrors and projects the deterministic mechanism that you believe life to be. You turn yourself into the mechanism which you are conceptually invested in. There is something reductive and circular in the constraint that you have established for yourself.
When we step outside of that framework, we enter a realm where personal conviction, however powerful, takes precedence over shared, testable reality.
Well this is certainly true, and there is no doubt about it. The hinge-points here are the phrase "personal conviction" and what you have set up as against it: "testable reality".
There are vast realms of human knowledge, understanding, apprehension of meaning and sense, and indeed of value, that are now outside the domain of testable reality. What you do, therefore, is pretty much what I have been describing: you set up a conceptual barrier which renders an entire realm (of human perception and experience) as being determined by "personal conviction", and by that what you mean to say is that which is illusory and unreal.
These are, perhaps, linguistic and semantic tricks and with these you have constructed your conceptual house.
And that is why I counter-propose the following (which is a Carlyle quote) as a potential antidote to a very strange philosophical orientation which, as I imply, has you in its grip when other alternatives are possible:
But the thing a man does practically believe (and this is often enough without asserting it even to himself, much less to others); the thing a man does practically lay to heart, and know for certain, concerning his vital relations to this mysterious Universe, and his duty and destiny there, that is in all cases the primary thing for him, and creatively determines all the rest.
What I suppose that you should do, and perhaps you will do, is to link-up your own mind with a computer network in such a way that you, Big Mike, merge into a
truly determined *world* that is really and truly a mechanism. Your basic assertion is that man is nothing more than a mechanism. The implications of such a philosophy are genuinely alarming were they to become, let's say, state policy. It would be interesting to project your deterministic philosophy into a dystopian scenario or some sort of political-social outline which also involved the ideas Aldous Huxley wrote about in
Brave New World Revisited.
In my own view I regard your ideas as a type of intellectual madness and I do not say this as a barbed joke. You have not, I do not think, actually examined or considered where, ultimately, the ideas you play within tend. Yet you seem to have a religious-like conviction that you have come into a special form of *truth*. I doubt that this is the case.
That’s a world where each person’s truth can be as valid as any other’s, even when they’re contradictory, which is fascinating but doesn’t leave us with much common ground for rational debate.
What you did here, and in the paragraph proceeding, is to show how your reductionist ideas actually function. You are right: when seen from a scientistic perspective any man's idea about life in any way that is outside of sheer mechanistic principles is entirely subjective, and one man's ideas, because they do not exist on a base where experiment validates them, is just a meanigful, and meaningless, as any other!
Bravo!
But the issue of *truth* as it pertains to man's deepest perceptions, and to meaning & value itself, is a whole other domain. You have to engage with it and through that process arrive at decisions about what is valuable and necessary. All you are doing is finding a way to surrender that ground and to avoid responsibility.
That is why I said, right at the start, that if you are going to talk about the present conditions and conflicts in our culture you are going to have to know something about the actual issues involved. And you do not have much, or possibly any, background in those areas. You are applying an extremely limited and reductive model and you genuinely believe it to be absolute.
