People like to come up with theories as to what existence is, how it got here, what comes after it, what was before (past lives, afterlives, religion, reincarnation, eternal recurrence, ect.). Considering the fact that any of these ideas COULD be true, wouldn’t it be fair to say that ANY ideas we can imagine about what existence is and what’s beyond, before, and after could possibly be true? So any explanation we can imagine and create in our minds regarding these matters could -POSSIBLY- be true? If that’s the case, how can someone choose one to believe in if there are infinite possibilities, some of which we haven’t even thought of yet?
People will choose amongst those alternatives that they have or can think of. That is the ones that they will choose amongst, but if they want the right one then that becomes harder when it can be the ones that they have not thought of or can think of. The problem comes when people talk beyond what their own possibility will allow. Like it will say that you cannot experience item such and such, and yet they talk about that item all the time even though you can never experience by their own idea. So you have to wonder how that possibility has become known.
- Consider the possibilities of which you have become aware
- Attempt to eliminate the improbable possibilities via intuition.
- Learn the distinction between improbable and impossible.
- Narrow the list further via the awareness of the impossible.
- Listen for more possibilities and repeat.
- When there is but only one possibility left, you KNOW.
This is a fantastic post. David Kellogg Lewis defines possible worlds as infinite in number, concrete as one another epistemically, and causally isolated. What you’re describing is the best way to a complete philosophical ontology that accounts for all levels of certainty. Are you familiar with Lewis?
Okay, I’ll bite. Smears, you’ve been talking about Lewis since you got here. I have read what i can find of him. There seems to be the suggestion that his work has some merit.
So I ask you, and/or the OP - what does it mean to believe in a possibility? It seems that if I say “It’s possible that God is a pumpkin” that this can be construed as a belief in a possibility. But what am I committed to, here?
You’re committed to analyzing everything. You’ve got the understanding of epistemology that exceeds that in most textbooks, so you can look at a statement like god is a pumpkin, and then you’ve gotta construct a world in which that proposition would hold. If in doing so you have to violate the most basic principles of logic, or if you’ve gotta piss all over the physical laws that we know governs this world, then what you do is you label the world where god is a pumpkin as “merely possible”, and of course the world you’re in right now is the actual one.
I think Lewis thinks to have a full ontology, you’ve gotta even deal with things that aren’t in this world. You can’t dismiss anything. So you go about essentially analyzing propositions which either will or will not hold in this world. If Thomas Kuhn was to do this, over a period of time, he would start saying that the actual world is something way different than what he would have said the actual world was in the past. Considering the term “actual” as being indexical, as in it can be used to describe only one world at a time, but could describe more than one over time, is a way in which he factors for things like new knowledge coming in, or the correction of mistakes in our thinking about the principles that govern the world we are in.
So when I was a little kid, the actual world was a place where there was a tooth fairy, a fat man bringing the occasional present in december, and my parents knew everything. After I went thorough a bit and analyzed other propositions in the world I’m in, I’ve now decided that the world I thought I was in w/ the tooth fairy is merely a possible world, and that the actual world, (for now), is one in which those propositions do not obtain.
Please ask me more questions, the more I get to talk about this stuff the clearer it becomes to me Faust.
So as a from a non philosophical view, if you’re not religious, and you see a guy who is, and you’ve both diligently analyzed the world around you and concluded opposite one another, the joke is that you’d say to each other, “you don’t know what world you’re in”. When making descriptions, you can use the ctot and see if it corresponds to any possible world. If you can envision it then it’s possible.
Then what you do is you go around with all these descriptions of possible worlds, and you start doing a comparative or counterfactual analysis of the possible world you’re considering vs the facts that surround you in the one you’re in. The goal is to eventually categorize everything, and I mean everything such that you have a the most complete possible description of the facts of the world you’re in and can place all the bullshit into merely possible worlds.
Okay. So far, so good, except that Lewis didn’t come up with this. My grandmother could have come up with this. She was not very philosophical, by the way.
That seems hyperbolic to me. I think you can dismiss plenty. That doesn’t mean that anyone, myself included would always get this right. But again, my grandmother …
But was it “merely” possible? if it was, what is the value in bringing it up in an ontological context?
But what have we gained? That it’s possible that God is a pumpkin? Where do you go with that? What issue is advanced, what problem solved?
That seems like a lot of work. I feel comfortable jettisoning the Pumkin-God without going into all that. Am I just lazy?
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that’s my brief summary of part of what I think he says, minus a tremendous amount of context and alot of finer points that he makes which probably address the issues that you are intuitively considering.
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a scientist can dismiss lots of stuff when constructing an ontology, so can an engineer, but not a philosopher man. we need completeness no? We could actually have it in the abstract, we should go for it to try and prove our method is sound.
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the value of bringing it up in an ontological context is because a) not everyone is smart enough to tell fact from fiction and you sort of have to throw apparent contradictions at people sometimes to get them to think, and b) again, we need completeness. We aren’t making an ontology for one purpose or another, we want a philosophical ontology into which we can categorize anything, and I mean anything that we might encounter.
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what you’ve gained is a proposition which doesn’t apply in the world that we believe ourselves to be in. So if you sense intuitively that it doesn’t, then you can use the counterfactual analysis to prove it doesn’t hold here in this world, but locating empirical facts which contradict it, forcing it into mere possibility. Because of course, as a philosopher and skeptic, you know you can’t prove god isn’t a pumpkin without diluting the hardest definition of proof.
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It’s not alot of work, it’s just a long winded description of what people are doing who are doing it right. You jettisoning the pumpkin god could be restated as, "i was confronted with the proposition that god is a pumpkin, and upon an empirical investigation of self evident facts around me, I determined that the proposition that god is a pumpkin could not hold under the circumstances here, so I made up a fake world where gods are pumpkins, and I sent the proposition there so that it could be happy. And yeah, you might be a little lazy, but I don’t know if it’s really having an impact when it comes to this kind of stuff. I’m pretty lazy myself, but I don’t think it hurts my ability to do philosophy.
What we need to do is read his shit about cross world identification of objects, and whether one object can exist in more than one world at a time. Toward the end of all his writing on this, he starts talking about what he calls the “trans world hier line” which has to do with where concepts, or names originated and how that has to do with how we categorize them. I think he’s pulling from kripke, but like a kid at a buffet, be might not be choosing a balanced meal. Some of the stuff of his I’ve read I almost think were just drafts that some assholes released for a few bucks, because the reasoning gets really hairy.
Well, I don’t think a scientist has to do any ontology at all. I’m all for sound method, but I am still at a loss as to how Lewis’ method adds to the process.
Sure. But what’s the difference “That doesn’t exist” and “That doesn’t exist, but it’s possible”.
What’s the counterfactual for “God is a pumpkin?”
I don’t think I am lazy.
A scientists has to know the basic principles governing what he’s doing as a scientist. His whole world might be in a big bubble, inside the bubble of philosophy. If that makes sense. So no, he doesn’t have to put together a complete inventory of everything, but he’s gotta know what he can do, what he can’t do, and what he’s working with and the conditions under which he can perform science. I don’t think Lewis adds anything to the scientific method, I think he just passes on a pretty good understanding of what they’re doing. He’s essentially trying to do what they do, but in the field of philosophy. He wants to quantify and categorize everything, and he thinks the best way to do it is by this method. With infinite possible worlds, you don’t have to dismiss anything, you just set it aside, that way you’re never confused about what exists.
I’m not sure how Lewis would put this, but I like to say that “doesn’t exist” is a misnomer. Everything exists, in some form or another, either as a real fact of this actual world, or as a possibility in another world, or as an impossibility nowhere. You can’t have a world that’s not a world, but the idea of it can exist in this one, and through some kind or identity between the representation via the idea and the object, there’s existence, however watered down it might be. It’s one of those things that to me, doesn’t seem intuitive, but I suspect makes reasoning about other things later on more efficient.
The statement would be something like, “god is a pumpkin”, then the response would be, “due to the evidence I have seen around me in this world, I conclude that it is highly improbable that god is a pumpkin, I can’t prove that god is not a pumpkin, because of the nature of gods and pumpkins and the extent of my understanding of them in this world, so while I cannot say that it is false that god is a pumpkin, I will for now, say that if god is a pumpkin then he is so only in some possible world other than this one.” See, now later on, if a pumpkin saves your soul, you wouldn’t have made an incorrect statement about the nature of the pumpkin and it’s existence, only about it’s location among all the possible worlds, which isn’t as bad as just saying something is false when you really can’t prove it philosophically.
I don’t really think you’re lazy. Last I remember you were managing a bar, which is not a lazy person’s job. I used to hate moving all those kegs and shit. But I know you have a disdain for the abstract, as I do for things like nietzsche and all those people who shoulda been taught in another department, and I’m lazy when people ask me about them, so maybe in this instance, but probably not. Who knows man?
That’s great … and, you know, it makes me feel okay that I’m alone in this world as one that is unprecedented, unrepeatable and unparalleled. Nice meeting you smears and have a nice world of your own.
Two responses and then a combo of A and B:
A -Well, let’s take past lives. You could have repeated experiences with past lives that seem to work: in one of the various systems that has a version of past lives. IOW you have memories of past lives. Perhaps you even can do research after a memory and find, yes, they wore sandals like that. In working with the memories you connect the death to a current phobia and after going through the feelings of the past life (or hallucination) you find that the phobia is no longer present. Perhaps you do shamanic work and while being worked on you see images from a specific life at a specific period of time in the past and place. When this is over the shaman talks to you, without hearing first what you experienced, about the very life and place you saw during the ritual.
IOW the presumption of the OP is that faith is the only connection to a particular set of beliefs. This is certainly true for some members of those religions that stress faith, these latter being a subset of the available religions out there.
B - I think also more purely pragmatic accounts could be given. IOW even without experiences that support, for you, the belief, you find that the religion as a whole feels like it is working. You are happier, you have broken an addiction. You feel at home in the world. The more you practice the religion, the more you feel things you want to feel. This is connected to how strongly you believe in the religion, even including believing in portions of the religion that are far from your experience and you cannot tell if they are improving - for example, afterlife ideas.
But you continue to participate in the religion because it is or seems to be working for you.
A+B Then you can have a combined version where you have both experiences and what seem to be pragmatic results of participating in a religion including the specific beliefs of that religion.
Last, believing in these things can also be seen as working/being right for you and not necessarily ruling out other vehicles - this last a term often used by those who think a number of paths work but for different people. Some who use that term or have a similar concept think many of the paths/religions leads to the same God/truth whatever. Some do not.
A tangential thought: your beliefs about the opposite sex might have similar foundations.
And you might even pay a golf instructor for continued lessons for very similar reasons to those argued in A and B. Or a consultant to a company. Or a psychiatrist. Or a marriage counselor. Or a basketball coach.
“Existenece”, “Reality”, “Infinity”, “possible”, these are all thought structures and catagories. These are parts of paradigms.
These are not “natural facts”, or “natural conditions”, even.
Although I believe in reality that exists without an observer, I don’t believe that it naturally has or needs a name.
Names are stamped onto things after we form an idea about them, but they don’t start out as having a name.
I’m willing to bet that the majority of reality is never observed.
Possibilities are real when they are actuated, potential and such can be real, but that doesn’t make much possible.
The majority of force is in its natural state, which will typically just be one way and not change until a foreign agent is added.
The path of least resistence is the essence of what is most likely possible.
All that gods and monsters stuff is not following the principal of least resistence.
The universe is minimalistic. It doesn’t have an “existence” outside of how we can have a sense of things existing.
That is how minimalistic it is.
I hope you understand.
You must realize that it is more likely that there is as few of worlds as possible. Instead of an infinite amount of possible worlds.
I may sound like I’m contradicting myself because on one hand I believe there is an infinite mass of many realms and degrees. But I also believe that each of these realms and ranges of things is as minimal as it possibly can be. Each area of space is subject to a general principal of least resistence. So I believe there are allot of frozen realms, which have stopped moving and changing. And the moving realms are slowing down. I don’t mean to confuse anyone.
There’s a guy who argued that only 2 worlds are actually necessary.
This guy. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Stalnaker
Some worlds are impossible, so you can totally ignore them, at least for now.