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Post by Tyler on Mar 18, 2006 10:59:27 GMT -5
If you believe something to be true, and someone else holds a contrary belief, by definition, you believe they are wrong. We'll start with me, then we'll run through others in turn. Take all your beliefs about the nature of the universe and specifically religion, and decide what percentage of your beliefs diverge from mine. This should give you an integer rating of how crazy you think I am.
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Post by jtmx1 on Mar 18, 2006 15:51:43 GMT -5
“If you believe something to be true, and someone else holds a contrary belief, by definition, you believe they are wrong. We'll start with me, then we'll run through others in turn. Take all your beliefs about the nature of the universe and specifically religion, and decide what percentage of your beliefs diverge from mine. This should give you an integer rating of how crazy you think I am.”
About 100 years ago, something like this looked possible. The ultimate aim was to show that the mind was a logical engine and any set of beliefs was a logical system. If that bold thesis is true, then the small subset of it that concerns our mathematical ideas, must be true as well. Whitehead and Russell tried to prove this limited thesis in their monumental Principia Mathematica. Responses to that work eventually proved that any set of axioms strong enough to produce elementary mathematics can be used to produce a statement that ensures its own incompleteness. Thus the limited thesis is unprovable and the larger thesis is, too.
The upshot is that we must be very careful when we deploy logical concepts to belief systems (what can we even mean by "system"?) and people. Concepts like soundness, consistency and completeness are not directly applied to the human self. We all believe things on insufficient evidence. We all believe things that cannot be proven. We all believe some false things. We all believe things we don't know that we believe. And we think we believe things that we don't actually believe. These are ineradicable problems.
Now, this doesn’t mean that logic has no place in our understanding of people. In fact, I would argue that there is no such thing as an explanation that doesn’t deploy some kind of logic. (Example: I watched the movie Frequency today with Jenn. The last 15 minutes of that film do not make any kind of physical or metaphysical sense—at least I can’t think of any way to explain them. However, there is an inexorable dramatic logic to them.)
Anyway, you can’t escape using logic to understand yourself and others, but you also cannot rely on it for complete explanations of the kind you seek. The truth, as happens so often in life, is in the middle. I cannot really judge how much your beliefs depart from my own, for all the reasons I gave above. Worse, we don’t even know very well how adequately any set of beliefs relates to the truth. Isn't that the endpoint you have in mind?
We can note our disagreements, and we can discuss them, but beyond that is yet another vista onto the vast sea of human ignorance.
Jeff
PS For the sake of discussion I am going to make a guess on your poll. Humans agree about virtually everything. That is what makes our disagreements so interesting. I would even argue that most of the premises you and I adopt about religion are the same PROVIDED you phrase them like so: "If religion is not bankrupt, then it would be wise/prudent to accept x." We disagree on the question of bankrupcy, but that difference need not undermine our agreement on most questions.
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