This is my point exactly. In a court room, you may rely heavily on witnesses, and they could be lying. So truth in this case does not equal fact as it is not verifiable.
Cartesian doubt is a philosophical process similar to scientific method to determine what is real, and that in a nut shell, is how I would observe the world. As for solipsism, I don’t agree that it is so certain and anyone who thinks so must ignore the obvious. Philosophically, “I think therefore I am”, would in science be “I think because of a highly developed brain”. Philosophy may be an interesting subject, but I don’t think it has as much weight in today’s world as it once had, mainly due to scientific discovery. Philosophy is a subject wherein people tried to explain the unknown, without having an all mighty God to back them up. But like religion, philosophy as a subject is losing authority simply due to scientific discovery. And this includes the self and personalities. Science has made such inroads into the function of the brain that the last mysterious organ is losing its mystery fast. Subjects like philosophy and psychology will soon be subjects of the past as neurology takes over.
I fully agree with you here, which is why I put “truth” on shaky grounds in my example of the witness in the court room. Some people believe in Bigfoot, and they will have claims such as the examples you provided. This in my book goes in the same category as religion. There is exactly the same amount of evidence that God exists and that Bigfoot exists. Carl Sagan said: “Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence”, a philosophy I would adhere to.
I largely agree with this. One problem is that there is no “philosophic method” in the way that there is a scientific method.
A lot of philosophy involves word-use and definitions. And a lot of philosophy involves making analogies. These are interesting ways of manipulating symbols, but they don’t come with the wonderfully practical method that science has, of trying to knock down the theories we come up with. Scientific experiments aren’t done to prove things, but to disprove them. Science makes progress by finding gaps and holes and shortcomings in its ideas.
Science is a little like sculpture: you take a huge block of marble, and chip away the bits that aren’t true. The truth must be somewhere in the part that remains.
Philosophy attempts to be more constructive, more like sculpting up from a wad of clay, rather than chipping away at a block of marble. But it doesn’t come with a validation mechanism, other than hoping that other people will say, “Okay, yeah, that sounds right.”
In science, “That sounds right” is only the first half of the job. The other half is, “But let’s see if we can find a flaw in it before we accept it.”
(This is a longwinded way of saying, yes, I agree with you!)
It may be longwinded, but I like the way you describe the difference by using art.
Does that conclude the debate though? We seem to have moved into philosophy and science which may help in answering the question, but does it convince. I for one, think it does and I stand by my conclusion that belief is a choice.
You haven’t supported your position yet because you haven’t defined which types of things are in your “belief” set and which ones aren’t.
So, avoiding any word games, once again, are you able to define the set of things you think we arrive at by choice? It doesn’t have to be a perfect definition, just something to get us started.
Ok, I’m just going to throw out some examples, let’s see where this takes us.
1 - A person age 10 has been raised in a religious environment and has never had the idea presented that God may not exist.
2 - A person age 21, same situation
3 - A person age 21, same situation with exception that at age 21 one person briefly presented the idea that God may not exist
Questions:
A - Is the “truth status” of the existence of God considered a “belief” in each case?
B - For those that are “beliefs”, were they arrived at by choice?
What if I have nothing in my belief sets, since I chose not to believe in anything. I prefer to know, based on fact backed by evidence. Some of that fact is self-evident, such as airplanes fly. It seems incredible that an aluminium tube weighing tons can carry hundreds of passengers and fly across the world, and it may require belief if there wasn’t a basic understanding of aerodynamics explaining how the plane can fly. I don’t need to believe that a plane can fly, I know it and I understand how.
You bring up some good examples. However, I would make the child even younger in your example, because at 10, children do tend to start exploring and learning about the world themselves. Regardless of the child’s age, children are inherently trusting of their parents and will believe almost anything told to them. Evolutionary biologists think this is due to the fact that it takes many years for a child to develop wisdom and knowledge, so in order to keep safe, parents are trusted to do so. For example, “Don’t go to near the river as you may be attacked by a crocodile.” Sound advice if you are living near the Nile river thousands of years ago. The problem with this is that a child is easily susceptible to superstition and religion. (Both the same to me). “Be careful in the forest, there are trolls in there”. “God hates fags”. The child obviously doesn’t chose these beliefs, they are chosen for him by the parent. The beliefs are forced upon him when he is vulnerably receptive to believing anything told to him.
At age 21, actually earlier, I would say, once you hit puberty, you may start to question some of your parents beliefs. Add public education and the teen can start forming his own opinion. He begins to have choice. If education is unavailable, the teen, may be limited to what he learns from around him. If he is one of those that do not seek the truth, he is bound by superstition. Not only is it his choice, to a certain extent, it was also the choice of his parents to tell him what they believed to be true.
And I keep answering. I may consider things could be true, and even likely to be true, but I will never go as far as believe it to be true.
For example, the big bang theory to describe the origin of the universe is a very good theory and is backed by some evidence. So far the theory has not been disproven. For that question, I would consider BB to be quite likely. But I do not believe it. I think it is possible, but I would want a lot more evidence before I take it as fact. And for all we know, there may be another theory out there that has not yet been formulated which would be even better at describing the origin of the universe. I for one, think BB only explains a portion of the universal origin, we also need to know what was before, and so far physicists seem to think that there was nothing. I understand in principle this theory, but I am very skeptical. I think there must be a better explanation than that the universe started from nothing, So, there is your example, to me, Big Bang out of nothing could possibly and maybe even likely to be true, but I can’t believe it to be true.
No, you keep missing the point because you keep responding with the word “believe” despite my numerous attempts to eliminate your problem with the term and just focus on HOW things enter our set of likely true items.
Your claim is that you choose which of these items get added into your set.
I asked you a simple question: is the set you are considering the ENTIRE set of likely true things in your brain or not?
If there is something that isn’t clear about that question, let me know and I will try to clarify.
Perhaps I’m missing the point, or you’re not understanding my answer.
You asked me about a set of likely things I consider to be true in my brain. Likely, meaning could be true, but not enough evidence, in which case I would say and have been saying, NO. I do not have a set of things which I consider to be likely true. Not by your definition. Could be true, sure, but I’m always a skeptic.
Let me try another example. The sky is blue. Just about everyone can accept that this is a true statement. And we can also explain why the sky is blue scientifically. However, the way I perceive blue may be different from the way you perceive blue. So if I viewed the sky from your perspective, the color by my definition might be green. In all likelyhood, you and I perceive blue exactly the same, (unless you happened to be colorblind), so, in this case, is it likely? Yes, can I be 100% sure No. Which brings up the new discovery that there is a very small percentage of the human population who have superkeen color sense. They can perceive color in such varying degree that they could see a variety of additional colors in the sky, where we only see blue. This ability had been undiscovered for a long time, because no one thought there was such a thing and the few people who had this ability didn’t realize they had it and went around thinking everybody saw the same colors. It was only discovered because of technology allowing this to be tested. Even so, science was already aware that the range of colors went far beyond the spectrum and range that humans could perceive, we just didn’t know that there are humans capable of observing more than what was though to be the human limitation.
Pretty much this. I don’t think anyone can just flip a mental switch and make themselves believe. But they can at least sometimes deliberately immerse themselves in an environment conducive to believing in something, avoid dissenting opinions, avoid thinking about logical flaws and countervailing evidence, and so on until they do believe in whatever-it-is.
Come to think about it, that seems like pretty much a self imposed version of what cults do to persuade people.