Your problem
Offline I'm a pretty simple guy. I enjoy eating macaroni and cheese. I like to eat mine with a fork. My friend prefers a spoon. It would seem to me that, rationally, a spoon would be a more efficient tool for macaroni consumption. Using a spoon, one could scoop up more macaroni with less effort, and finish eating more quickly. And yet I use a fork. Why? Because eating efficiency is not my concern? Certainly not; I shovel as much macaroni into my mouth as I can get onto the fork. So why? Why do I insist on eating with a fork? The answer, of course, is simple. I eat with a fork because I want to. I like eating with the fork.
So your problem is thus: how do you convince me to use the spoon instead?
On the other hand, I suppose a spork would provide even more efficiency...
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The only way to persuade irrational people is by engaging them emotionally rather than by logically, by the way.
"If I don't think something can be explained conventionally, it must be magic. And magic comes from God!" -everyday religious person
Or through aesthetic dialogue... or good writing... or monumental example... or a ripping good metaphor... or...
Ir-rational, it seems, may indicate anything from a person with whom one cannot initiate a conversation in any way to a person who simply doesn't think that much of reason as a concept or a means to truth.
www.acrc.co.nr www.myspace.com/deinonychai
I value coherency in my arguments with those who I desire to understand me. Were I having a discussion with someone less interesting, I could just as easily be spouting out word salads, or using made-up words (something I also readily enjoy).
Indeed. It is my hope, however, to one day become perfectly irrational, if such an acheivement is possible. Obviously, this will take some practice, and engaging in rational discussion holds me back from my goal, as I see it, so I am careful to only engage those who I deem worthy. It's like being on a diet, and if I ever plan to lose all that weight, I certainly can't eat every piece of chocolate cake walking down the street. Only the best are worth diverting me from my goal. Savvy?
I would argue that techincally, particular moves within chess are neither right nor wrong. They could be more aptly described as being "within the rules" or "against the rules." Likewise, any particular mathematical statement is either congruent with the mathematical whole (in which case it is considered "correct"
, or not. I would wager that, did the most basic mathematical tautologies not comply to empirical study (i.e. if for some reason x didn't always equal x), then mathematics would be just as useless as any other field of thought which doesn't conform to reality (religion could serve as a prime example).
Actually, it only speaks for those atheists in this forum who care to discriminate between different kinds of theists, and while I appreciate the apology, I would appreciate even more an effort to actively promote discrimination between theists.
High Pope: The fork is the irrational mind. The spoon is the rational mind. The macaroni is anything that can be perceived.
Truth Serum: Let me break it down for you:
This entire topic is about my irrationality. The statement of my irrationality is not the end of the thread, but rather the beginning. Do try to catch up, will you?
If only more of the people here understood that. Wonderful. Astounding. Marvelous. I could sing your praises just for that simple statement.
Thats dumb. Im starting my own thread about Macaroni.
Your a fork user.
High Pope
Dude, I am flattered!
That still means that when you play chess there's a right and wrong way to go about it.
Well yeah...
A couple of things:
1) I wouldn't say mathematical tautologies 'comply'.
I'd say that the language that we use to describe reality includes mathematical concepts so mathematical operations have an application. Otherwise mathematics wouldn't be so useful, like you say.
2) With religion, it's not just the non-compliance to reality. Most of the religions we argue against aren't even internally coherent.
I've forgotten the reason why we brought up maths now...
Might as well join a religion since religion feels emotionally "right," not to mention that religion is all about revelling and flaunting solidarity.
"If I don't think something can be explained conventionally, it must be magic. And magic comes from God!" -everyday religious person
Haha holy shit, I just happened to click on denonychai's MySpace and he is already religious. Go figure lol.
"If I don't think something can be explained conventionally, it must be magic. And magic comes from God!" -everyday religious person
And this differs from logic... how? Logic is as much a tool of conviction as any of the things I've mentioned. It's the outworkings of the assumption that the universe is an orderly place that can be explained through deductive and inductive propositions. Aesthetics might well be described as the outworkings of the assumption that the beauty and attractiveness of an object or proposition is the standard by which its merit should be judged. Logic convinces the one who believes in the possibility of objectivity, metaphysical removal and patterns within existence; the monumental example convinces the one who believes in the importance of, say, a Nietzschian superman or a divine avatar of some sort.
This is Heidegger and Sartre at their most basic levels of phenomenology and existentialism. Nothing revolutionary or specifically theistic about it.
For starters... there's no appeal to emotion here whatsoever. Beauty, monument, and well-constructed sentences don't inherently require any emotional investment. Phenomena can be judged under such categories with all of the insipid emotional removal you want, just like any dialectic proposition. Concomitantly, logical argumentation can stir all sorts of satisfaction-emotion in people who believe themselves to have uncovered some great truth of the universe. Logic and emotion are by no means in dualistic opposition to one another.
Secondly, there is seemingly no reason to believe that the reasoning of the left-brain should be preferenced over the right. Why you or anybody would think that emotional conviction should be undermined in favour of logical conviction is unknown... pragmatism, perhaps?
As for the religious thing... it's really no secret. I have a link to my specifically religious website as a part of my signature, and the vast majority of my blogs on MySpace are religious in nature. The profile picture is tongue and cheek. I would consider myself religious, but... you'd probably have better luck determining the nature of that beast via my other link and/or the blog posts on MySpace... if you accidentally stumble across such things, that is.
www.acrc.co.nr www.myspace.com/deinonychai
denonychai,
I created a dichotomy between emotion and logic, and you attempted falsify the dichotomy either by (a) pointing out that there are more options than emotion and logic or by (b) arguing that emotion and logic are the same thing. You don't make clear your intent, but either way, both (a) and (b) are false.
(a) is false because all your examples can be classified as either emotional or logical. My reply to you explains how (and to use your terms) propositions are deemed aesthetic/monumental NOT because it is accurate (accuracy = logical), but simply because they are convincing (convincing = logical or emotional or both). Your fallacy was thinking that aesthetics/monumentalism was neither emotion or logic. Again, propositions are described as aesthetic or monumental simply as testament to their persuasiveness/power to convince, but do NOT assume that just because something is convincing then it must be logical. As I said politicians often persuade people by appealing to their emotions rather than by logic.
(b) is false because your examples do not illustrate this. It is readily explained as logic and/or emotion, and the very fact that a distinction can be made disproves (b).
Your reply does not address my point; you are also arguing a point that I never made.
Emotion is prone to inaccuracy because emotion is purely guided by selfishness and prejudices. Emotion is elementarily biased to seek means to protect and better its source, e.g. via backwards rationalizing, selective rationality, defense mechanisms, denial, etc.
So when one says that XYZ appeals to emotion, what they are also saying is that XYZ appeals to some people, NOT because it is accurate, but because XYZ supports their desired prejudice/agenda/ego.
"If I don't think something can be explained conventionally, it must be magic. And magic comes from God!" -everyday religious person
That you are able to classify the entire scope of human interaction into a simple dichotomy is neither altogether surprising nor important. The histories of Western philosophy and theology are rife with such dichotomies, none of which are in any way meaningful in virtue of their stupidity. Logical/emotional, righteous/sinful, good/evil, moral/immoral; each of these are fully capable of tyrannizing every possible means of interaction with their meanings, yet you appear to presume that the ability to classify a phenomena within a dichotomy somehow gives the dichotomy hermeneutical prerogative. Your classifications work, but only as well as any broad-sweeping category can hope to work: poorly. Defining aesthetic argument as “emotion” pinpoints one of many possible – and by no means necessary – outcomes of aesthetics and monopolizes the whole through the part. The logician might call this “hasty generalization”; I just call it dull and simplistic nonsense, ironically convoluted by the fact that logical and emotive discourse can both stem from and surround each of the things I mentioned: in other words, since one can compose logical aesthetics or rationally and unemotionally evaluate a well-written piece of literature, it is as much a member of the “logical” category as it is of the “emotional” category.
Regarding “accuracy”, you’ve defined the word in accordance with your prejudice; equating accuracy and logic, however, is little more or less than just that: a prejudice. “Accuracy” does not exist apart from the language used to define it, and logic is – when defined in the most generous of lights – a language, or more diminutively defined, a tool of language. There is, primarily, no evidence to support the existence of any universal, indisputable and immutable table that contrasts “the Accurate” from “the Inaccurate”, and secondarily, no evidence to support the notion that logic would be its equivocation. Such things are yours to believe in, should you so choose to, but to the discredit of any notion of objectivity you may or may not cling to. I have no such notions of myself or my position; I recognize that my evaluations of accuracy are subjective to my own prejudices. Hurrah for me.
Aesthetics, the monumental, and the well-composed dialogue: it is less a fallacy to state that these are neither emotion nor logic, and more a move of intellectual integrity… allowing something to be without attempting to degrade it with meta-categories. Meta-definitions are blind-sighted to the dynamic nature of life, and controlling to the point where they become irrelevant; this is already happening in your post. It seems ridiculous to me that anybody would suggest that an aesthetic or monumental judgment would be defined as such solely on its charisma. Augustine is an incredibly aesthetic writer, yet I could never accept any of his judgments (I am not persuaded); Hegel presented one of the most monumental philosophies of the modern era, yet I remain unconvinced of it. Greece denies movement; Heraclitus paces around the room.
They also seem to like simplistic dichotomies. “Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists.”
As for this business about equivocating logic and emotion, you are quite correct; my examples do not illustrate an equivocation, most likely for the sole reason that I never thought to equivocate them. My only desire is to delimit your differentiations. They are different concepts, it is true; however, they make poor opposites, especially since they have the nasty habit of intermingling and concomitantly existing all at once. One can put forth a valid, sound argument and feel extremely good about oneself while doing so… this doesn’t seem that hard to conceive.
Not to be facetious, but… what is your point? I’m not sure you made one that I didn’t address, though – in all honesty – I could be mistaken.
This is entirely possible.
The qualifiers you attach to “accuracy” are rather interesting, and further betray your prejudices: prejudice against selfishness, prejudice against elementary instinct, prejudice against truth-as-defence, and so on. Also… a prejudice against prejudice (which I presume to mean the indemonstrable assumptions that are not in line with your own indemonstrable assumptions). You must live in a beautiful world. I am curious as to why, exactly, you think that selfishness, instinct, and self-defence are such bad things… it’s refreshingly “slavish” (to use the pejorative Nietzschian), something I don’t see too often outside of Christian metaphysical and teleological constructions, something I’m rather against in its purest and most vulgar forms. It also further betrays the limits on your “accuracy” prejudices, namely that a decision made to better the self over and against the other is “inaccurate”. Unusual, but interesting nonetheless.
www.acrc.co.nr www.myspace.com/deinonychai
I have never been so stunned to see someone disregard rationalism despite the fact that by definition you use rationalisation in every second of every hour of every day, it is the way your brain solves problems, or at least thats the basis of it, to rationalise is to articulate and think about the decisions that you make.
If i walked in to a shop that sells my favorite sandwich it is rational for me to buy it, being irrational would mean buying a sandwich that i don't like (with no motive).
Animals make what we can define as rational decisions, a mouse fleeing from a cat rather than charging towards it. The mouse itself is not rational although we can identify it's descision to flee as a rational descision.
Religion seems to divide our motives, people often choose religion for peace of mind and that would be rational, but the motive of choosing a religion should be based solely on what is the truth.
What annoys me is people fail to acknoledge that emotions are not spiritual in any way, it's a fact that has been proven time after time yet in true theist fashion people tend to disregard information that doesn't support their agenda. A theist and I had a discussion a while ago, he talked alot about the heart as an emotional center, armed with the knowledge that he gained from a tv show that said that the heart has a bunch of neurons capable of storing information. He forgot to add that the people in the show that recieved heart transplants didn't recieve any difference emotionally but they in fact merely had different appetites or preferences on certain things.
There is a very famous experiment where pidgeons are placed in cages and fed through a tub randomly, after a while the pidgeons start to believe that a certain ritual causes the release of the food, so they constantly do this ritual.This experiment has since been tested on humans with the same results, showing how stupid we are in making choices and just like the pidgeon we disregard when things don't support our beliefs. People need to make a concious descision not to follow that pattern, and those that disagree, do you think that the pidgeon is right to believe he can control the food?
[A] How do these tyrannize interactions? (And by the way, this is such ambiguous writing that it is open to so much interpretation. I know you're trying to write persuasively, but please save the colorful, flowery words for the novel; debate is won by content, and concision is easier to understand and more impactful. I'm not trying to be condescending; I'm only trying nip this early in the bud. The rest of your of reply's verbosity needlessly makes it difficult to understand, and I think if you genuinely want to spread a message, you should be a little more sensitive and accomodating rather than try to be as difficult as possible. I believe debaters call this obfuscation; I call it, "not getting to the point."
)
[B] Your objection is incoherent. You're basically saying that if X is either Y or Z, X is not Y or Z. That is elementarily incoherent because if we further reduce the set of "Y or Z" as W, then you're also saying that if X is W, then X is not W. Plain and simple - if something is classifiable within a set (dichotomy, triad, whatever), then it TAUTOLOGICALLY follows that that something can only be something within that set. How can you argue against tautology?
[C] This is a straw man. Never did I suggest that an argument is described as "emotional" because it is aesthetic. Read my post again and you'll see you have it BACKWARDS. I emphatically made it a point how arguments are described as aesthetic because they are convincing, either logically or emotionally. Describing an argument as "emotional" is NOT the OUTCOME of aesthetics; it's a CAUSE of aesthetics. DO NOT MIX THIS UP.
[D] No, it wouldn't be a "hasty generalization;" as I've said, it would be a "straw man."
[E] You're stacking assertions one after another, but assertions are just that. Where is the proof? Until then, your feelings are moot seeing that this is an exchange of logic. Oh wait, you can cop out now by saying that you don't believe in logic. But then you probably realize that if you said that, you'd be a hypocrite because throughout your entire life, including this moment of our debate, you've been using logic. Not to mention that it's impossible to defend irrationality without rationality.
[A] Logic seeks accuracy. You telling me that I'm prejudiced to not reject this definition is a complete non sequitur.
[B] Again, all of this is an assertion and NOT a reason. You still haven't explained how linguistically indentifying something makes it questionable. Do you question the concept of "dog" simply because man's best friend is linguistically identified with the letters, "d," "o," and "g?" Or what about your responses here? Why should I even listen then? It makes NO SENSE WHATSOEVER.
[C] There is evidence: logic. Your objection can not even exist without conceding to logic because the need for "evidence" exists SOLELY because of logic (e.g. the rules of logic). How do you object to something without using logic?
I counted the number of sentences in your "rebuttal." 5 sentences. How many of these 5 sentences were assertions? 5. How many of these 5 sentences were reasons? 0.
You're wasting your time trying convince logical people by trying to express how you feel emotionally instead of expressing why you feel that way (the reasons). No where in your emoting did you ever explain how nature being "dynamic" makes it undefinable/unclassifiable. There is NO relationship between dynamicism and classifiability.
This is absurd. Now you are saying that because politicians do XYZ, then ALL XYZ must be bad too. Do you even realize that is the root of PREJUDICE? Politicians drink water, so I guess you shouldn't drink water too! Ridiculous! And by the way, politicians often use false dichotomies. Are you also saying that there's no difference between a dichotomy and a false dichotomy? ABSOLUTELY ABSURD.
Yes, I made it clear that logic and emotion can coexist. This does NOT prove anything in the context of our discussion. Secondly, I NEVER stated that they are opposites.
My point is that your initial reply to me is a false analogy.
I never said those things are "bad." Reiterate your point without writing a 6-page soccer mom editorial. And an assertion with reasons would be nice.
"If I don't think something can be explained conventionally, it must be magic. And magic comes from God!" -everyday religious person
I'm about ready to give up if I don't get anywhere with denonychai. I'm NOT exaggerating when I say that I truly believe that religion is a PSYCHOLOGICAL DISORDER. Your mind will do ANYTHING to backwards rationalize any irrationality that non-theists point out. I also know this from personal experience and know how religious people think (at least Protestant Christians) as I was devoutly religious for the first 22 years or so of my life. I look back and cringe at how absurd I was.
My point: You can't really reason with someone with a psychological disorder, let alone someone who doesn't want to admit he/she has one. I'm hoping I'm proven wrong.
"If I don't think something can be explained conventionally, it must be magic. And magic comes from God!" -everyday religious person
Strawman! Lol
Enlightened Atheist, Gaming God.
As well you should be. It's not every day I put down my fork for the convenience of someone else.
No, there's just a way to either follow the rules, or not. "Right" and "wrong" don't have factual value in chess. Supposing that I one day decide to open a chess game by moving my Knight to King's Bishop 6, and declaring checkmate, my opponent would not declare that my move was wrong, but that it was against the rules of the game.
They comply because we make them comply in a way that is useful. If they didn't describe reality in a way that we found useful, they they would be as ultimately as meaningless as, say, the rules of chess.
I was talking about rational knowledge coming from empirical evidence, and you suggested math as a counter-example.
[MOD EDIT - fixed quoting]