No Fundamental Distinction Between Science and Religion

I have to accept that you are speaking of merely cognitive reasoning. Beliefs are often formed by unconscious reasoning. Not much of the population exercises cognitive reasoning, “thinking”. But then we are actually talking about the evidence involved in science and the associated reasoning. Without cognitive reasoning, it can’t be science at all. Cognitive reasoning is what allows for communication and verification of speculations (aka “science”).

So it is really an issue of credible evidence, not presumed beliefs. Evidence accepted yet not questioned is not credible evidence. One cannot be certain that his evidence is credible until he reasons that it is credible.

But even on the subconscious level, what you sense as “belief” is actually the result of subconscious reasoning. If the subconscious cannot use its reasoning to form a belief, there will not be any belief presented to the conscious. To the subconscious, there was no evidence with which to form a belief. And even on the unconscious level, all sensing (the source of evidence) is the result of actual reasoning, such as “because this particular nerve was triggered, something touched my arm” or "because light appeared at this point on my retina, light is being emitted from that point in space".

There is reasoning on every level of “evidence” else that level of mind does not accept even a belief.

I know that and it was not a typing mistake this time. I did that intentionally to check how you react to that.

LM,

This is called escapism. You are just unable to counter anything, that i argued so far. So, you are saying this to save your face.

Let me put that question again to you-

LM, try to address the arguments, if you can.

Mere rhetoric is not sufficient. It can be handy and adds to the beauty of the argument but only if there is some reasoning behind that. Rhetoric is like the icing of the cake but you cannot make full cake with it. Nobody is going to eat that.

with love,
sanjay

Some scientist may have had faith along the way, but most people are luckily about to separate faith as fiction from fact from reason.
But I think you need a history lesson.
The Roman EMpire was home to the Greek philosophers and the site of the worlds repository of the greatest body of knowledge until Christianity. Until justinian shut down the Schools of philosophy: Epicureanism and Stoicism became heresy.
This plunged Europe and North Africa into a intellectual dark age.
The same thing happened in “Islam”, and fundamentalist Islam grew the Arab nations that had ben the repository of all the lost knowledge was about to suffer the same fate. And by the end of the 12thC nearly all investigation into science was over.
Some of the texts of the ancient thinkers had been preserved, but had to wait until the schism of religious thought the Reformation which enabled the re-discovery of some of the old knowledge party through their preservation in Arab private libraries.
THis together with the invention of printing revolutionised the transmission of knowledge to a degree that the religious authorities were no longer able to control it, as they had done for over a thousand years.
It was never a guiding force for anything but suffering, and ignorance.

Knowledge does not come though faith.
I can have faith is X, but that means I cannot progress with it, To grow you must reject faith, and open your eyes to justifiable reality.
A person with red hair can ride a bike. But that does not mean that bike riding comes thought the possession of red hair. You need to think a bit more clearly about your notion.
Faith is an impediment to reason, by definition.
The enlightenment was that moment when faith was put aside and people dared to think for themselves. You are in a state of extreme delusion. All the great thinkers of the time were atheists and deist, who had rejected faith, despite that being illegal and putting themselves in danger of prosecution and prejudice. Diderot, D’Alembert, David Hume, John Smith, L’Mettrie, Rouseau, Montesquieu, Franklin, Jefferson, Thomas Paine, Pierrre Bayle, Baruch Spinoza, Giambatista, Schiller, Goetre, Beethoven.
THe list is endless.
Before you can learn you need to shuffle off Faith. Before you can think about something new, you need to give up something that is not true, if you have faith that a thing is true and you have arrived at a belief through faith rather than reason you are unable to do this, except by loosing your faith.

If we had had no religion science would have been a thousand years more progressed. Because it was religion that shut down the schools of philosophy and controlled knowledge dogmatically for a over a thousand years, making it a come of heresy to object to.
These are the facts.
And since Islam took control of North African and the Middle East it has produced NOT ONE significant contribution to science, until secular values were reintroduced.

These are not facts. These are your speculations.

I agree entirely with your post; reasoning is a conscious/semi-conscious process that can be linguistically followed, which much of manifest existence clearly isn’t. But this last paragraph confuses me - Hume explicitly and forcefully argued against the rationalist view of reason’s primacy. That’s what he did; that’s most of what he did, and is famous for, philosophically. That you don’t deduce that the sun will rise tomorrow, but accept it as a regularity of sensation. Why do you choose him as the standard bearer?

Also: “a mistake that Hume made (and maybe others before him) that created a lot of problems- you end up with skepticism and Berkeleyian idealism”. Berkeley wrote before Hume was born, so even if your criticism holds, definitely others before him :slight_smile:

It is a totally false understanding of Hume.

Mine or his? Do you have an argument, or just a declaration?

That depends whether or not your agreement extends to his caricature of Hume, or you were just agreeing with the rest of the statement. Hume did not make that presumption. Sensible qualities are impressed on our thought, reason is a process we choose to apply to our impressions.

I believe 'unconscious reasoning' to be an oxymoron.  Certainly beliefs are formed from time to time by unconscious processes, but to call those processes reasoning makes no sense to me. 
 So for example, I throw a ball, and a dog catches it. The ball is moving at a certain speed, describing a certain arc, to end up in a certain place at a certain time, and the dog puts his mouth precisely where it needs to be, when it needs to be there.  Would you say that dog performed [i]unconscious trigonometry?[/i] I would not.  Dogs don't know trig. For that matter, neither did the person throwing the ball in this example.  The dog certainly had some sort of unconscious process that put his mouth where it needs to be, but I don't see why it has to be parallel to the process a person would go through if they were consciously working it out as a math problem.

If I were in the 16th century, I might agree with you. But these days, we know far, far more about how a brain and mind function in order to accomplish what they do. And yes, I really would say that the subconscious performs that “trigonometry”, but in its own terms.

Mathematics is a cognitive language for the conscious mind. The sub- and unconscious mind doesn’t use that language except in extraordinary cases. The unconscious mind uses inherent logic applied to its limited perception and the subconscious mind uses comparative rationality to aim toward a goal. Both can be reduced to probability and statistics, but not using the language of mathematics, merely the effects of assessing a perceived situation from one step to the predicted next step, which is all mathematics does. Both are cases of reasoning. They both perform the function of intelligence to accomplish a life supporting goal, merely using different languages and methods.

Relating to the process of awareness / consciousness there are two „ways“: b[/b] the way from semiotical, linguistical operations to logical (philosophical), mathematical operations, b[/b] the way from mathematical operations to logical (philosophical), linguistical, semiotical operations.

Some of the non-human living beings have consciousness, but they have a very much smaller brain and less consciousness than the human beings have. Only human beings have such very, very complex conscious systems, especially the linguistical, the logical (philosophical), and the mathematical system. Let’s say that some of the non-human living beings have a pre-consciousness because the diffrence betwenn their consciousness and the consciousness of the human beings is too large.

An example:

A lioness „instinctively »knows«“ how much cubs she has. When one or more of them are lost, she realises it, but she can’t count like humans can. At first the lioness „goes“ the conscious „way 1“ without any linguistical and logical operations (see above), thus from the semiotical operations (sign: „lost cubs“) to the mathematical operation („all cubs – missing cubs“), and then she „goes“ the conscious „way 2“ without logical and linguistical operations (see above), thus from the mathematical operations (for example: 7 – 2 = 5) to the semiotical operation (sign: „less cubs“). The mathematics in the brain of the lioness works but she doesn’t „consciously »know«“ that it works.

Another example:

A predator must be able to calculate the „worth“ of attacking a prey If it is not profitable or even too dangerous, it is better to protect oneself and to gather forces. A predator with a broken leg can hardly catch a prey; a predator with a broken lower jaw can hardly eat a prey: a predator without a tongue can hardly drink. Predators must „instinctively »know«“ much about their environment and their skills, their risks, what is possible and what is too dangerous.

In order to survive the non-human living beings don’t need such a complex brain, such a complex awareness / consciousness, especially such complex systems of language (linguistics) and logic (philosophy), as the human beings have. Human beings are luxury beings.

Human beings can say: „I don’t want to eat today because tomorrow or later I am going to eat a Sacher torte“. The evolution of the luxury beings means the process of winning more and more luxury at the cost of losing more and more instincts, means becoming less and less beings of adaptation to the environment but more and more beings of alienation, of insulation. Nevertheless, human beings are also predators, but they are luxury predators because they are luxury beings.

To me it is all about like arguing if a calculator or computer “uses logical deduction”, “thinks”, and/or “knows the answer”. It is all just how you want to define the words and concepts. As far as I am concerned, the method for deduction and intelligence is pretty irrelevant to the concern of whether something is actually deducing, reasoning, or responding intelligently. They all get the task of reasoning done, by whatever means they do it else none of them would survive at all. Without any type of reasoning, an animal wouldn’t even be able to see, breath, eat, or walk.

Science like government is a purely political and economic affair.

… and now involving indoctrination, propaganda, and coercion.

Same as it has always been.

I can’t much credit, I’m aping Thomas Reid as usual.

My take on Hume is that he argued against it because he saw the rationalist view as flawed and the[i] only alternative[/i] to skepticsm and thus he embraced skepticism. That's the part of Hume I'm disagreeing with.  In other words, he thought that in order for a belief "there is a tree" to be justified given the premise "I see a tree", it had to be grounded in some additional, rational argument, axiom, or observation.  He could find no such thing (the closest he got to was 'the future will be like the past'), and especially no evidence that people do any argumentation when percieving, and so he argued for a skepticism of the world beyond perception that Reid and ultimately Kant had to respond to.   Same thing with belief in causation; causation isn't immediately delivered by the senses, no axiom or argument gets us to causation from what we do percieve, so therefore we must be skeptical that there is such a thing as causation.   I (thanks to Reid) say the act of 'seeing a tree' includes both the belief formation and it's justification, the belief formation is not a thing that happens after the seeing as a result of some bridging rational process in ordinary circumstances.  Looking for such a process is a mistake, and not finding it is no cause for skepticism. 

So briefly:

Hume thought: Sense perception + Reasoning = belief about external world = skeptism about external world, because the reasoning is bad/non-existent.

I think: Sense perception = belief about external world + accompanying experience = Belief in the external world because a bridge between perception and belief isn’t needed.

And to bring it back to the point I was responding to, to say that sense perception involves reasoning is to invite general skeptism as any formulation of that alleged reasoning is bound to be found lacking. And now I’m aping Ernest Sosa…or this other guy I read at the same time as him who’s last name begins with a G. I think.

Ha, you’re right about Berkeley. Sorry, Early Modern was a long time ago. Yes, it was a combination Hume and Berkeley’s skepticism of knowledge of the real world that Reid and Kant wrote in response to.

If you want to call what the brain does to get from "I see a tree" to "There is a tree"  'reasoning', it's just a word and I've not real problem with your vocbulary.  My point would be that what the brain is unconsciously doing doesn't resemble the premise-> premise-> ...... conclusion pattern that we think of as conscious reasoning.  You aren't going to find the 'good argument' for why seeing a tree justifies thinking there is a tree hidden in the human sub- or unconscious. I think you'd have to define 'reasoning' as "Any old thing a mind happens to do, conscious or otherwise" in order to successfully say that sense perception involves reasoning.

EDIT And then I saw this from you:

So it sounds like we’re basically on the same page. To me, ‘reason’ describes a very specific faculty that involves examining the logical interaction of propositions. From my point of view, the mind does a whole bunch of things that aren’t reasoning.

Well as I said before, you are obviously talking about “cognitive reasoning” only wherein one is aware of each step in reasoning. To me, that is a bit like saying, “there is arithmetic, algebra, and trigonometry that all make sense, then a bunch of other math that doesn’t make any sense.” Just because you are not conscious of the reasoning, doesn’t mean that it isn’t there.

Surely you can agree that when you look at a tree, the light from that tree is scattered in an array across your retina stimulating neurons in a pattern. And some part of you brain has to be deducing that because the color changes to green from this neuron all the way over to that neuron and then changes again to whatever and then whatever and the final pattern resembles that of a tree, “I am seeing a tree”. You are not cognizant of the photons striking your retina, the neurons being triggered, the synaptic decisions being made, nor the waves of sensations that form that visual map of the terrain, but certainly that have to happening, else you could never become conscious of the tree image merely from scattered light.

The more instinctive mind does not watch itself try to reason, it merely does it. Much like riding a bicycle or playing a musical instrument, one might at first have to consciously attend to each tiny effort but after some practice he becomes unconscious of the very many automatic feedback control actions he is making. Do you say that he didn’t decide on each effort he made just because he wasn’t cognizant of them, or do you say that he just wasn’t conscious of each decision that he was in fact making?

The entire function and purpose of a brain is to sense, analyze, and adjust its environment. It does nothing else. It doesn’t have to watch itself doing it and is often better off not doing so (although it would be good if it would be inspired to verify its conclusions much more often - especially when posting online 8-[ ).

[size=150]One need merely have faith[/size] [-o<
… in your Lord :evilfun:
[size=85]… we scientists.[/size] 8-[

#-o

Faith is the power by which the will can propel recognition out of the dark cave of the indiscernible.

Berekely was a a sort of ironist for Hume, to deal with reactionary , secondary views. I don’t really think that he purposefully set himself up to his student’s retort , to test the immateriality of material.