Atla wrote: ↑Sat Nov 30, 2024 9:07 pm
I find it a bit weird though to call the accuracy of our internal representations "truth", we seem to be skipping a step or two. I'd say accurate representations usually help establish what the "truth" probably is, but for example if I have an accurate representation of a rainbow, that doesn't mean that a rainbow as such really is out there. We need more than just the brain's evolved internal mechanisms to decipher what's going on.
My understanding of BM’s position is that the facts of science, that enable all our technologies (physics
et cetera), is where the “truths” that he refers to are located. And “truths” of that sort is realized when one has grasped a physical phenomenon and how it operates. He has a mind of a certain type: literal perhaps. He is after all a mathematician (according to his own admission). His mind has been trained along geometrical and mathematical lines (like in the proofs of Euclid’s
Elements).
My impression of his endeavor is that he seeks a bedrock,
the bedrock, upon which he can reasonably construct his physicalist worldview. He hangs
everything on that peg. Thus the physicist is the man with the tools to decipher and “explain” reality, and thus life. Philosophy seems only relevant to him insofar as it offers a rhetorical means to communicate the “value” he recognizes.
The missionizing aspect of his discourse is the most interesting or telling feature. “All speech is sermonic,” said Richard Weaver, from the selling of breath mints to more developed, and consequential, formulations about “reality”. We are always preaching
something.
BigMike
really wants to convince his readership that he has a grip on bedrock truths (that trump other epiphenomenal truths, i.e. illusions). If you don’t agree you will be cast aside. No counter-conversation will be brooked.
We need more than just the brain's evolved internal mechanisms to decipher what's going on.
To describe “what is going on” must involve definitive statements which, if I understand correctly, require explanations that have a final tone. The terms of an explanation must seem ultimate, incapable of further analysis, and then they are “true” beyond questioning.
I personally do not have too much problem with
sciency explanations of what goes on around us, and in us. The real pressing questions however are those that pertain, very directly, to metaphysical interpretive models, not to science definitions.
(Hello BigMike. I hope you know that I know that you read what I write and all those that you have on ignore!)