Belinda wrote: ↑Fri Jun 20, 2025 7:24 pm
I think the argument is because Will thinks as a modern post-scientific enlightenment man thinks; whereas Immanuel has the unthinking faith of a medieval man, but simultaneously tries to be scientifically enlightened.
Gary Childress wrote: ↑Fri Jun 20, 2025 6:55 pm
Belinda wrote: ↑Fri Jun 20, 2025 6:52 pm
Gary Childress wrote: ↑Fri Jun 20, 2025 5:59 pm
I don't know. That's what I'm trying to figure out.
Your experience is real. Your experience includes your interpretation and your evaluation of the phenomenon.
Some people believe there is a supernatural Experiencer who knows all experiences, even the experience of a sparrow as it falls in death.
And some people don't. As I understand it, IC believes in a supernatural experiencer. Does Will? Or what is the argument over? It sounds like we aren't getting to the kernel at the core of the disagreement, maybe? Or perhaps the existence or not of a "supernatural experiencer" is the kernel?
The issue is twofold and very simple.
First issue - You and Belinda have both dealt with Immanuel Can over many years now, why are you two taking his words at face value still? He is invariably misrepresenting something at all times, you both know this already, but you treat him as a reliable narrator like you wake up and every day you have no history or memory.
Second issue: The origin of the debate you are confused about lay with a discussion over science and how it should be understood. Willy B made a point that anybody passingly familiar with 20th C phil of sci would be tempted to attribute to Thomas Kuhn. Namely that all observed data about the world around us can be supported by innumerable mutually contradictory theories that NEVERTHELESS ALL FIT THE AVAILABLE EVIDENCE.
So for this purpose - being for me to inform you rather than for me to report exactly what has been written already - Let us say there are three theories in play for why the apple in your hand looks red to you. Theory one is that there is a real apple, in your real hand and it really looks red. Theory two is that God imagines the universe and then we exist as imagined beings within it, and God chooses for the vision of the imagined apple to appear to you as a red object. And theory three is that the universe is being simulated beings of the 83rd dimension in a sort of computer, you happen to exist in a simulation run where it just so happens redness is being presented for apple type objects, but tomorrow (their tomorrow) there will be a power cut and when the universe is rebooted, due to a buffer overflow, apples will be tartan and will always have been tartan and the phrase "5 red apples" will not refer to any object in the universe.
You don't need to try and outwit any of that, you only need to be smart enough to comprehend it. All three theories are compatible with all the evidence that is to hand. Every observation ever made by any scientist is compatible with them all and with many others that equally are incompatible. The thing I just described is what Kuhn calls "underdetermination" and it is basically solid grounds for continuing uncertainty. It's not a complicated distinction unless you are a gaslighting loon like Can. Like all abusive relationships, what Can wants is to have perfect certainty for himself, and for you to be cast into such doubt that you rely on his judgment, thus he cannot be open to organised uncertainty.
Anyway, at some point in that underdetermination story, Willy B holds that whether you choose to see the apple as being an actual red object versus an immaterial phantasm in the mind of God is not determined by reliance on evidence so much as an act of faith, or as he describes it, the aesthetic preference for the explanation that you find most pleasing. For that purpose, epistemological informalities such as a preference for parsimony & elegance, or a great respect for the authority of ip-dip-dog-shit, are just aesthetic preferences.
Everything else that follows from there, has just been Can trying to gaslight Will about that sort of thing. Although what preceded it was also Can gaslighting. He does that every day, he does viable philosophical argument far less often, arguably never.