Having a discussion with you is like arguing with a child who stick carrots in their ears while screaming \"NA NA NANA, you're not real. I can't hear you!\" So, for the very last time, because my time is more valuable than playing rinse-and-repeat science instructor to someone who thinks a light bulb functioning with universal consistency is equivalent to a 2000-year-old description of a purported one-time event, I will repeat this nice and slowly for you: [/b]
Not once in any of our discussions have I resorted to insulting you, and not once in this debate have you said anything besides \"I am right because I am!\" You have met each of my posts with evasiveness. If your idea of debate is screaming \"I am right!\" louder than your opponent and then insulting him, then I certainly hope it isn't successful.
The only things you have available to you as a source of knowledge about the physical world are your senses.
There is nothing outside of this sensory environment available to offer an \"outside\" perspective. If you want to believe that every sensory perception you have is an illusion created by an fluffy white bunny shining his carrot-light onto your mind and creating this vast hoax that is consistent and complete and outside of which you have absolutely no experience, be my guest. Then you can define science as the study of that consistent, repeatable, complete hoax. That does not in any way diminish the value of science, since, if there is a giant bunny running the hoax show, the hoax is still all that you are able to experience. [/b]
Not once in this debate have I claimed knowledge outside of perception, so take down that straw man.
You are part of this closed system that is the universe, and your senses are confined to it. If you want to speculate about something that may or may not exist beyond -- something that, being outside of the system, you can neither experience nor test -- that's fine. Have at it. But do not compare your baseless, idle imaginings to tested, consistent, experienced science. One is something that you, as a physical, experiential being, by definition cannot experience since it lies outside the system and is therefore unavailable to your senses. The other is something that is experienced and confirmed every day. They are not comparable. I cannot disprove your giant fluffy bunny theory any more than you can prove it. Any imagining is as plausible and implausible as any other, because none are testable. It is idle speculation. Period. Whether there exists an objective world of tables and chairs and computers and light bulbs or all is simply direct electrical input into the mind by a rabbit or some great celestial being, the result is the same -- this world of experience. This physical world which science studies. Speculation about what is beyond is a simply an imaginative, psychological exercise since you have no experience to justify such speculation and corresponding beliefs. [/b]
Science and beliefs arrived at through it IS NOT the same thing as experiential reality. Our experiences ARE all we can know, what we cannot know is how they relate to the outside world. What we experience is touch, light, taste, smell, sound, memory, thought, etc..., we don't experience a broad scientific view of the universe, we have a very local and defined perspective. You claim that a materialistic view of the universe is necessary given our senses, which it is certainly not. For all we know, senses are completely dissassociated with each other, seeing yourself touch a mouse and feeling the mouse and remembering a similar occurance could be coincidental, or remembrance of the same occurance could be caused by the occurance itself. In order to arrive at a scientific understanding of experience you must use certain baseless assumptions, chiefly the assumption that memory is an accurate record of past occurances. For all I know my memories could convey future events, or events that never have and never will occur at all.
Science not only necessitates assumptions, but belief in events outside of our perception. For example, you probably are not seeing the electricy that your computer runs on being produced, and yet you establish it's production as a cause of your computer's ability to run. You say that because you remember hearing that electricity is produced in a power plant in your area and routed through wiring to your computer it must be true. You probably don't even remember experiencing the production of the electricity used by your computer and so it is decidedly an event outside of your experience, just like Zues hurling down lightning from the heavens.
So what, in this case you have, to support your belief, is a memory which may or may not be accurate of a second-hand(at best) account which may or may not be accurate of an experience unlike any you can remember. You may be right, or you may not, in any case, to call it knowledge would be unjustifiable.
The world experiences is a very, very small one. It comes down to the raw sensory data that you are percieving at this very instant. Any beliefs explaining that sense-data are mere conjecture, including science and metaphysics. If this is the end of this debate, then my position is not only I don't know, when it comes to metaphysics, but also I don't know when it comes to science. I wiill go even further and state that no being of similar nature to mine, has the ability to know. By nature, for better or worse, we are constrained to knowledge only of each of our direct experiences.
|
|
Bookmarks