Note to others:
Does this strike you as reasonable?
My point revolves more around the extent to which someone might have a particular belief about life after death, and is then able to demonstrate why and how all rational men and women are obligated to share it.
Quite the opposite of insisting that anything one claims to say about it is “automatically right/reasonable/justified”.
In fact, more along these lines:
Bringing it down to earth would involve exploring interactions with the dead. Sure, some people claim to have done it. Others claim that has never been done. A investigation would require a detailed examination of the claims.
Exactly!!
There also is a “down to earth” examination of existence.
It’s not all pie in the sky.
Who is arguing that it is? But there is still a considerable difference between an argument that consists of words defining and defending other words, and an argument in which these defined and defended words are intertwined in mathematics, the laws of nature, empirical evidence, personal experiences, and assessments that are able to be either verified or falsified.
In other words, If I concurred with your own assessment of what I do in these posts. Trust me: I get that part.
It seems that there are fairly obvious obstacles to progress, which could be removed. If you don’t remove them, then you will keep going around in circles.
For example, if you focused on one issue for a while, instead of jumping around, then you may reach some useful conclusions about that one issue.
Okay, let’s bring this down to earth.
You choose the issue. You choose the context in which the issue unfolds. You choose behaviors precipitated in that context.
Then we can discuss our reactions to these interactions. Interactions that precipitated actual consequences perceived as either true or false, right or wrong, autonomous or determined, etc.
Until we have a complete understanding of existence itself, any demonstration about anything in the interim would seem to be necessarily problematic.
You tell me: How could this not be the case?
Well, you’re never going to understand everything. You have to accept the limitations of human understanding.
But it doesn’t mean that humans can’t understand some things sufficiently for some purpose.
Well, among other things, a purpose on this thread [of late] revolves around our capacity to determine if the exchange itself is only as it ever could have been. Given that [as some argue] the brains engaging in the exchange are merely matter wholly in sync with laws that propel and compel it into the only possible way there is to explain things like space-time.
That seems to be one of the differences between you and other people who are not bothered by these issues. They’re not looking for the one optimum solution which has bridges “the gap”.
So what? Does that make the gap – the optimum solution – go away? Especially when “here and now” we don’t even really know for certain that they were ever really able to freely choose not to be bothered by it. Or not to look for it.
We are all in the same boat here. We are trying to explain things that are clearly embedded in any number of Rumsfeld’s “unknown unknowns”. I merely speculate that our psychological reactions to that seem embedded more in dasein than in a frame of mind that philosophers are able to construct out of arguments derived from such tools as logic and epistemology.
Thus…
But the “objective truth” here will always be predicated on what is still to be known about the ontological nature of existence itself.
In the ancient world, there was an objective truth about the shape of the earth, the rotation of the celestial bodies, etc.
New information came to light and a different objective truth was established.
There will be other discoveries and the objective truth may change again.
Okay, we can then speculate as to which is longer…
1] the gap between what they knew then and what we know now or
2] the gap between what we know now and what our descendants will know 3,000 years into the future or
3] the gap between what they will know then and all that there is to be known about “why something exist and not nothing?” and “why this something exist and not another something”
Then going all the way back to God and/or to the “natural” explanation for the existence of existence itself.
That doesn’t bother me. I still call it the “objective truth” because it’s the best established truth that we have.
Seems to bug the hell out of you.
Here I suggest that being “bothered” by something like this revolves more around human psychology than anything philosophers are able to determine. The less bothered you are the more likely it is that you can secure some measure of comfort and consolation for “I”. For some on this side of the grave, for others on the other side too.
And it bothers me because I am honest enough to acknowledge that in all likelihood I will go to the grave basically clueless as to how my life does fit into Existence. And what [if anything] it means. And then the part about oblivion. If that is what it is.
So: cue the distractions.
Look, I’m the first to admit that, intuitively, Greene’s conjecture seem to be completely absurd.
How about completely irrelevant?
What use is it in anyone’s life?
How on earth would I know? How on earth could I know? But: are there in fact actual answers to be had?
And the bottom line is that the evolution of life on earth has [so far] culminated in human brains able to ponder such things. But only a very small percentage of us on earth don’t leave these things entirely to God and religion.
Yeah, groping for answers [sans God and religion] seems entirely futile to me. But what else is there? All I can assume is that anytime I come here there is always the possibility of bumping into a point of view that shakes up mine.
Or that mine will shake up others.
But what do I know about spacetime next to him? What do you know?
So you trust him more than you trust your own experience? Why should you and conversely why shouldn’t you?
How applicable is anything he says about spacetime to your life?
What difference would it make to you or someone else, if he was right? If he was wrong? IOW what are the consequences of believing him?
Huh? You could ask the same thing of folks like Newton or Einstein? And, indeed, the vast majority of folks on earth have gone to the grave not giving a second thought to the practical relationship between the stuff they pursued and their own personal experiences from day to day.
But there it is: the connection. That would seem to never go away. However much or little thought any particular individual gives to it.
All I can do here is to keep pointing out that your petulant reactions allow me to convey a conjecture of my own: That you seem more intent on pinning me to the mat because my own frame of mind is construed [psychologically] by you to be a threat to your own precious I linked somehow to your own precious objective morality linked to your own precious rendition of God linked to your own precious belief in autonomy.
What I’m doing here, with you, is experimenting to see if I can shift you in some way.
Okay, fair enough.
You claim that you want to be shifted, but how to go about doing it? That remains unclear. Often it feels like zero steps forward. Sometimes it’s irritating. Sometimes I’m irritated by external stuff - nothing to do with you or philosophy or this site.
Given my basically home-bound collection of options [shrinking by the day], all I can do realistically is to ferret out those who are giving one or another new experience a try.
How [out in the is/ought world] are they not down in the hole I am in on this side of the grave? How are not troubled by the part about oblivion on the other side of it? And, involving even the either/or world, how do they know that what they think and feel and say and do is actually within their capacity as autonomous human beings?