Applying scrutiny to your beliefs

[SigurdReginson]

Okay, unpacking it is. I will start with this one: One of classical laws of logic as per Aristotle in the ontological and psychological sense.
"It is impossible that the same thing belong and not belong to the same thing at the same time and in the same respect."
"No one can believe that the same thing can (at the same time) be and not be."

Now here it is in the absurd sense for time, space and respect. A is A, right? Well, yes, no and in some sense only. If we reduce away time and space, these As are the same. If we keep different time and space, they are not the same. They are only similar in the respect of being As.
Now for the psychology of it. While that which is objective can't be changed by thinking differently about it, if it is subjective, someone could be thinking differently. Hence for X is Y or not Y, if in both cases further behavior follows based on both of them and both cases are with behavior, which can actually happen, you can get the following happening:
Some as e.g.: The world is natural.
Me: No, not just in one respect.
Someone: But it is a contradiction.

Well, not really, because it is that someone thinks that the world is natural and not and that contradiction in thinking doesn't make sense. But it is not a contradiction because natural is not in the same respect for all cases in time and space.
So I as a skeptic always try to do the words not just as thinking them but doing them as other behavior. The problem is the same for God and natural. They are both subjective concepts and abstracts, which are only real if you believe in one of them. I don't believe in any of them, because I don't have to.
So which is better?
I believe both in natural and God.
I believe in one and not the other.
I believe in neither.
Well, here is the test. Can you observe that there are humans, who individually fit of of the 4? Yes! Can they do it? Yes. Can they act further? Yes, e.g. I am doing it right now.

So what is the joke? What is going on? Well, the world is the set of all cases of in the respect of time and place and further cases of in other respects, but nobody have been able to reduce away the subjective, because if they claim that they can do it, they are doing the following:
They subjectively think that they are doing it objectively, but if I can do it differently, I do it. Hence - No, I can think subjectively different than them and further act differently. Indeed I am doing it now..

And now back to better! How do you experience better? Can you see it, feel by touch or by any other external sensory experience it? No, you experience it in your mind. Can you calibrate a scientific instrument to measure better? No, there is no scientific measurement standard for better.
So here it is with fancy philosophy terms. While apparently the world is physical, the mental/mind/subjective is caused by the physical and supervenes on it, but it can't be done physically. It can only be done by thinking/feeling in brains and if I can use my brain differently than you, then it is not a contradiction, because it is not at the same time and place.
So if I can do what matters, what makes sense and what is real to me differently than you, to you then that is not unique to us. That is so for all humans with a sufficiently function brain.
In philosophy that is an old one: Protagoras - "Man is the measurement of what is, as it is and what is not, as it is not."
Measurement is including better as what matters, what makes sense and what is real subjectively.

So if your epistemologies are better to you and you claim they are so for all humans, I as a skeptic just test if I can get away with thinking/feeling differently and further act on it. Just as I am doing now.

Regards
Mikkel

Thank you for illustrating your thought process in such a beautiful way! You are an incredibly thoughtful and intelligent person. Put that to some good use.

 

[mikkel_the_dane]

In your idea, how does a mind exist?

We don't know. We can use different assumptions about the relationship between the mind and that which is independent of the mind, but we can't know, because we know through the mind.

 

[SigurdReginson]

Assumptions are more provisional than beliefs, and easier to adjust, so there is less chance of getting attached to them. It allows for a more open approach to exploration and discovery.

So assumptions are unfixed understandings, while beliefs are fixed. I do find value in being free flowing with one's ideas in light that better evidence can come along to shape a more crystal clear view of the world. It's interesting that this understanding that free flowing understanding is in itself a fixed understanding.

 

[Vouthon]

Even still, there are some things you mention that I'm curious to hear more of your thoughts on.

You mention utilizing both faith and scientific inquiry in regards to testing your beliefs. Do you believe utilizing faith is something everyone should utilize in finding the roots of ultimate truth, or is that of use more on a personal basis (meaning it might not work for everyone)? Also, would scientific endeavors benefit from the incorporation of faith,?

Again, those are great questions.

I don't think utilizing 'faith' - which rests upon a personal conviction (that may be informed by spiritual or mystical experience, or speculative philosophical reflection) of what, if anything, lies beyond what we can verifiably test or confirm - is an approach fit for every person.

To qualify that a little, I do think there's good reason for assuming that most human beings are open, or oriented, in this fashion (to an extent) because of ancient psychological tendencies we have inherited - a cognitive architecture that lends itself, naturally, to faith or religious belief you might say, as well as sense-perception, reason and empirical testing. Faith is like an intuitive inference system.

I would posit this as one of the reasons why even the vast majority of nones / irreligious people tend not to be convinced atheists and may still entertain a spectrum of spiritual, or not strictly science-based, beliefs or behaviours. Spirituality in this sense has been defined by one academic researcher as “a personalised, subjective commitment to one’s values of connection to self, others, nature, and the transcendent”.

The phenomenon of agency detection is one of these psychological tendencies: Agent detection - Wikipedia ("It is believed that humans evolved agent detection as a survival strategy. In situations where one is unsure of the presence of an intelligent agent (such as an enemy or a predator), there is survival value in assuming its presence...Some scientists believe that the belief in creator gods is an evolutionary by-product of agent detection"). Likewise, many of the ritualistic practices associated with religion - such as communal prayer, singing, mystical dance, and assuming various postures for worship - are stimulators of the endorphin system and foment prosocial bonding, and so may (again) be traits with strong genetic fitness for survival under natural selection.

For some people however, either by innate predisposition or the adoption of a certain paradigm in adulthood (such as 'reductive physicalism' and ontological materialism), they may only ever be able to find a credible basis for believing in something, if it is capable of being demonstrated by means of (at least) testable consequences, that is - whatever belongs to the domain of science, and may not even being open to good empirically based speculative philosophical ideas about what may explain the data in areas where science cannot, or cannot yet, test, let alone religion. And that's fine for me.

Speculative philosophy, metaphysics, religion and mysticism have their place - but some people may just be content with what can absolutely and demonstrably be known in the objective, rather than subjective, sense and not consider the former worth their time.

I would cite the biblical tale of "*Doubting Thomas*". He had to see and touch to believe, it was not sufficient for his purposes to rely on faith, even if it was a faith conviction that - according to the understanding of the natural world, at the time he lived - was not entirely beyond possibility and may, actually, have had good explanatory power for providing an answer for the mystery of Jesus's corpse vanishing and the linen wrappings being left behind, the stone having been rolled away from the entrance to the Tomb and alleged sightings of him in a resurrected form by other disciples.

Thomas is, in many respects, acting in this tale as a kind of allegory for those people.

"But I think there is a maximal limit to what humans can know definitively about reality through the use of our natural reason and by means, say, of testable predictions."

When you say "maximal limit" do you mean there is a limit to the testable predictions that can be made through scientific testing ever, or are you saying that you believe that this "maximal limit" only applies to our capabilities now, and that this limit expands as our understanding of how nature works and can be manipulated continues to grow? If you are saying that you believe that there is a limit that humans can't ever move past, what has led you to this conclusion?

I mean it, pretty much, in both of the above senses.

If a religion is making truth-claims about something within the natural order, then it could theoretically - with advancements in our physical instruments and understanding of the laws of nature - one day be falsified through empirical test and, therefore, render it no longer a rational and evidenced basis for belief. For example, the ancient belief of the Greek philosopher Thales, in the fifth century BCE, that magnets are propelled by active "souls" has, of course, being contradicted by advances in the understanding of magnetism and the discovery of particles that hold two charges at once.

Purported miracles or interventions of God in nature, if sufficient material exists to subject the alleged miraculous happening to due scrutiny, should receive this same treatment.

However, a number of key religious beliefs - say, the doctrine of a transcendent, ineffable and incorporeal God - make claims that are explicitly supramundane and beyond the ken of scientific enquiry. These cannot be 'tested'. And I don't believe this is, necessarily, confined to the religious realm either.

I think there is a maximal limit to what humans can know definitively about even physical reality through the use of testable predictions, let alone something allegedly spiritual. The limit of observability in our universe is set by a set of cosmological horizons which limit—based on various physical constraints—the extent to which we can obtain information about various events in the Universe. The most famous horizon is the particle horizon which sets a limit on the precise distance that can be seen due to the finite age of the Universe.

As Professor George Ellis, a cosmologist, has noted:


Well, science does have its limitations...

Cosmology deals with all that was, is and ever will be, but as a science, he says, it has limitations.​

"The universe has only been existing for 14bn years. Light can only travel a certain distance in that time and we can't see anything further out. So there is a whole mass of stuff ... in the universe we know nothing about and we never will know anything about, because the light will never get to us in time for us to know anything about it."​

With that being said, I think that truth-claims in general must still be subject to reason.

We can differentiate - using good non-empirical arguments - between hypothetical things "beyond the limit" that are more consistent with the logic and workings of the world we do see (and so extrapolate into that "unknowable" based upon a set of known laws and factuals) and those that are closer to being utterly fanciful because they lack any explanatory power at all in terms of what we do see (i.e. the tangible, observable data).

Yet, there comes a point where even 'reason' may have an ending, in my opinion. States attained through 'prayer and mysticism' are states of consciousness, that is "qualitative" phenomena. Science, as presently constituted, pertains to "quantitative" phenomena and methods of investigation / enquiry. Brain scans of reported visionaries and contemplatives in an alleged mystical state, only show regions of the brain light up - say the amygdala, which has a role in processing emotion - but this is just a neural correlate, a quantitative measure.

Have we 'cracked', for example, how complex electrochemical signaling in neurons gives rise to subjective experiences? No, because we don't yet know how to get from the quantitative (which is properly, or traditionally, the domain of science, describing matter in terms of its quantitative properties like size, shape, motion or whatever) to the qualitative (qualia, subjective feelings - how it feels to be something, how a bunch of electrochemical neurons can have a sense of awareness) in an underlying theory. Koch calls this, "the seemingly unbridgeable gap between the physics of the brain and phenomenal experience".

One day, we may bridge that gap - but as with the horizons in physics, we also may not.

 

[mikkel_the_dane]

Thank you for illustrating your thought process in such a beautiful way! You are an incredibly thoughtful and intelligent person. Put that to some good use.

Thanks.

 

[firedragon]

We don't know. We can use different assumptions about the relationship between the mind and that which is independent of the mind, but we can't know, because we know through the mind.

I asked him specifically because his comment was to be clarified.

 

[SigurdReginson]

In your idea, how does a mind exist?

Oh jeez.... It's too early, and I haven't had nearly enough coffee to answer this, but I'll give it a shot!

As best as I can discern, the mind is a product of my meaty flesh brains. My brain has had 38 years of growth, atrophy, and everything in between to assimilate and forget information and utilize it in a way that has kept me from dying thus far, so it seems successful in this regard. Mission accomplished in not dying!

It's not a perfectly working system, though. To the ego, it's thoughts seem complete and working, in actuality they are fragments of things I felt were worthy enough to file away in the recesses of my brain.

Funny thing... Just the other day, I was talking to a forum member here about video games we played when we were younger. I never really think about such things, so while we were talking about this, old memories came rushing in about things I hadn't thought about in decades in regards to games I used to play. It was quite a trip.

TLDR; So I guess to me, all this is to say that I feel that the mind seems to be a product of the brain and exists within the brain's confines. "Reality" is only perceived this way because my brain has constructed for itself the ability to perceive what my senses have gathered through utilizing "the mind" and stores those things as information that my brain can look over and access much like a hard drive is able to look over and access it's files. If my brain is the hard drive, my mind is the operating system; though, this operating system seems to be comprised of several operating systems working in tandem with each other.

Why do you ask?

 

[firedragon]

Oh jeez.... It's too early, and I haven't had nearly enough coffee to answer this, but I'll give it a shot!

As best as I can discern, the mind is a product of my meaty flesh brains. My brain has had 38 years of growth, atrophy, and everything in between to assimilate and forget information and utilize it in a way that has kept me from dying thus far, so it seems successful in this regard. Mission accomplished in not dying!

It's not a perfectly working system, though. To the ego, it's thoughts seem complete and working, in actually they are fragments of things I felt were worthy enough to file away in the recesses of my brain.

Funny thing... Just the other day, I was talking to a forum member here about video games we played when we were younger. I never really think about such things, so while we were talking about this, old memories came rushing in about things I hadn't thought about in decades in regards to games I used to play. It was quite a trip.

TLDR; So I guess to me, all this is to say that I feel that the mind seems to be a product of the brain and exists within the brain's confines. "Reality" is only perceived this way because my brain has constructed for itself the ability to perceive what my senses have gathered through utilizing "the mind" and stores those things as information that my brain can look over and access much like a hard drive is able to look over and access it's files. If my brain is the hard drive, my mind is the operating system; though, this operating system seems to be comprised of several operating systems working in tandem with each other.

Why do you ask?

I wanted to understand how you would differentiate two different philosophical discussions, mind and a necessary being since you made the case that one could be made, while the other not.

Thats why I asked.

Edit. Thus,@SigurdReginson , since you made a philosophical case for the mind, why not a similar philosophical case for a being? Just out of curiosity, what if this "being" is the Operating System of the universe"?

 

[Vouthon]

Oh jeez.... It's too early, and I haven't had nearly enough coffee to answer this, but I'll give it a shot!

For a pre-caffeine kick, first thing in the morning response to one of the great mysteries of human existence - that was pretty damn excellent mate, so no worries haha

Why do you ask?

I wasn't really posing it as anything more than a rhetorical question, so much as it was an incidental point at the end of my argument there - to illustrate a subject area, the science of consciousness, where the advances in understanding of the neural correlates of subjective experience and qualia may bridge the gap one day, but also that they may not because quantitative and qualitative properties are measuring different things. But your description of your own understanding of the 'brain-mind' relationship was a great read, so many thanks for that!

My broader point was more that, in answer to your questions and as I explained in my last post, I believe we have some limits of observability in our universe, set by cosmological horizons —based on various physical constraints— define the extent to which we can obtain information about various events in the Universe. As such, to reiterate, I think there is a maximal limit to what humans can know definitively about even physical reality through the use of testable predictions, let alone something allegedly spiritual.

And, as I noted above, I also think that we can differentiate - using good non-empirical arguments - between hypothetical things "beyond the limit" that are more consistent with the logic and workings of the world we do see and those that are closer to being utterly fanciful because they lack any explanatory power at all in terms of what we do see (i.e. the tangible, observable data).

 

[mikkel_the_dane]

...
And, as I noted above, I also think that we can differentiate - using good non-empirical arguments - between hypothetical things "beyond the limit" that are more consistent with the logic and workings of the world we do see and those that are closer to being utterly fanciful because they lack any explanatory power at all in terms of what we do see (i.e. the tangible, observable data).

Well, I don't think we can. Here is how and why. If you are in a variant of a Boltzmann Brain universe, it won't change that, even if makes perfectly sense to believe you are not.
Indeed that there is a "we" is unknowable and while I do believe in that "we" and it makes sense to me, as far as I can tell don't cause or determine that there is a "we".

Here is what you in effect believe in some sense. That the universe is responsible for making sense to you, but I doubt that the universe cares about that.
I do believe in that we can somewhat trust our experiences and apparently it works. At least it seems so.
But here is the end the result. Most of us trust the universe to be in effect fair, regardless of how we individually in effect do metaphysics/ontology.

 

[SigurdReginson]

I wanted to understand how you would differentiate two different philosophical discussions, mind and a necessary being since you made the case that one could be made, while the other not.

Thats why I asked.

Edit. Thus,@SigurdReginson , since you made a philosophical case for the mind, why not a similar philosophical case for a being? Just out of curiosity, what if this "being" is the Operating System of the universe"?

Well, I suppose that we could be living in some kind of "Matrix" put in place by such a being, but meh... I feel that's not a position that holds much practical value. The idea that the brain houses the mind does, however, since I can observe how this happens via practical application and experience.

I've seen what happens to people who suffer brain damage, and how their brain reprograms their mind in accordance to that damage that can completely change how their mind works. This seems to be the way all brains and minds work, as I have never seen any other way this can work. Adding more to that via the Matrix seems superfluous more than anything else. I mean... What if the being who created the Matrix is in a Matrix of some other being, with that being also existing in a Matrix that exists within other infinite Matrices created by an infinite amount of other beings? I care more about the practical application of an idea, I suppose.

 

[SigurdReginson]

Again, those are great questions.

I don't think utilizing 'faith' - which rests upon a personal conviction (that may be informed by spiritual or mystical experience, or speculative philosophical reflection) of what, if anything, lies beyond what we can verifiably test or confirm - is an approach fit for every person.

To qualify that a little, I do think there's good reason for assuming that most human beings are open, or oriented, in this fashion (to an extent) because of ancient psychological tendencies we have inherited - a cognitive architecture that lends itself, naturally, to faith or religious belief you might say, as well as sense-perception, reason and empirical testing. Faith is like an intuitive inference system.

I would posit this as one of the reasons why even the vast majority of nones / irreligious people tend not to be convinced atheists and may still entertain a spectrum of spiritual, or not strictly science-based, beliefs or behaviours. Spirituality in this sense has been defined by one academic researcher as “a personalised, subjective commitment to one’s values of connection to self, others, nature, and the transcendent”.

The phenomenon of agency detection is one of these psychological tendencies: Agent detection - Wikipedia ("It is believed that humans evolved agent detection as a survival strategy. In situations where one is unsure of the presence of an intelligent agent (such as an enemy or a predator), there is survival value in assuming its presence...Some scientists believe that the belief in creator gods is an evolutionary by-product of agent detection"). Likewise, many of the ritualistic practices associated with religion - such as communal prayer, singing, mystical dance, and assuming various postures for worship - are stimulators of the endorphin system and foment prosocial bonding, and so may (again) be traits with strong genetic fitness for survival under natural selection.

For some people however, either by innate predisposition or the adoption of a certain paradigm in adulthood (such as 'reductive physicalism' and ontological materialism), they may only ever be able to find a credible basis for believing in something, if it is capable of being demonstrated by means of (at least) testable consequences, that is - whatever belongs to the domain of science, and may not even being open to good empirically based speculative philosophical ideas about what may explain the data in areas where science cannot, or cannot yet, test, let alone religion. And that's fine for me.

Speculative philosophy, metaphysics, religion and mysticism have their place - but some people may just be content with what can absolutely and demonstrably be known in the objective, rather than subjective, sense and not consider the former worth their time.

I would cite the biblical tale of "*Doubting Thomas*". He had to see and touch to believe, it was not sufficient for his purposes to rely on faith, even if it was a faith conviction that - according to the understanding of the natural world, at the time he lived - was not entirely beyond possibility and may, actually, have had good explanatory power for providing an answer for the mystery of Jesus's corpse vanishing and the linen wrappings being left behind, the stone having been rolled away from the entrance to the Tomb and alleged sightings of him in a resurrected form by other disciples.

Thomas is, in many respects, acting in this tale as a kind of allegory for those people.



I mean it, pretty much, in both of the above senses.

If a religion is making truth-claims about something within the natural order, then it could theoretically - with advancements in our physical instruments and understanding of the laws of nature - one day be falsified through empirical test and, therefore, render it no longer a rational and evidenced basis for belief. For example, the ancient belief of the Greek philosopher Thales, in the fifth century BCE, that magnets are propelled by active "souls" has, of course, being contradicted by advances in the understanding of magnetism and the discovery of particles that hold two charges at once.

Purported miracles or interventions of God in nature, if sufficient material exists to subject the alleged miraculous happening to due scrutiny, should receive this same treatment.

However, a number of key religious beliefs - say, the doctrine of a transcendent, ineffable and incorporeal God - make claims that are explicitly supramundane and beyond the ken of scientific enquiry. These cannot be 'tested'. And I don't believe this is, necessarily, confined to the religious realm either.

I think there is a maximal limit to what humans can know definitively about even physical reality through the use of testable predictions, let alone something allegedly spiritual. The limit of observability in our universe is set by a set of cosmological horizons which limit—based on various physical constraints—the extent to which we can obtain information about various events in the Universe. The most famous horizon is the particle horizon which sets a limit on the precise distance that can be seen due to the finite age of the Universe.

As Professor George Ellis, a cosmologist, has noted:


Well, science does have its limitations...

Cosmology deals with all that was, is and ever will be, but as a science, he says, it has limitations.​

"The universe has only been existing for 14bn years. Light can only travel a certain distance in that time and we can't see anything further out. So there is a whole mass of stuff ... in the universe we know nothing about and we never will know anything about, because the light will never get to us in time for us to know anything about it."​

With that being said, I think that truth-claims in general must still be subject to reason.

We can differentiate - using good non-empirical arguments - between hypothetical things "beyond the limit" that are more consistent with the logic and workings of the world we do see (and so extrapolate into that "unknowable" based upon a set of known laws and factuals) and those that are closer to being utterly fanciful because they lack any explanatory power at all in terms of what we do see (i.e. the tangible, observable data).

Yet, there comes a point where even 'reason' may have an ending, in my opinion. States attained through 'prayer and mysticism' are states of consciousness, that is "qualitative" phenomena. Science, as presently constituted, pertains to "quantitative" phenomena and methods of investigation / enquiry. Brain scans of reported visionaries and contemplatives in an alleged mystical state, only show regions of the brain light up - say the amygdala, which has a role in processing emotion - but this is just a neural correlate, a quantitative measure.

Have we 'cracked', for example, how complex electrochemical signaling in neurons gives rise to subjective experiences? No, because we don't yet know how to get from the quantitative (which is properly, or traditionally, the domain of science, describing matter in terms of its quantitative properties like size, shape, motion or whatever) to the qualitative (qualia, subjective feelings - how it feels to be something, how a bunch of electrochemical neurons can have a sense of awareness) in an underlying theory. Koch calls this, "the seemingly unbridgeable gap between the physics of the brain and phenomenal experience".

One day, we may bridge that gap - but as with the horizons in physics, we also may not.

Very interesting insight! Thank you for taking the time to type out your thoughts for me.

 

[firedragon]

Well, I suppose that we could be living in some kind of "Matrix" put in place by such a being, but meh... I feel that's not a position that holds much practical value. The idea that the brain houses the mind does, however, since I can observe how this happens via practical application and experience.

I've seen what happens to people who suffer brain damage, and how their brain reprograms their mind in accordance to that damage that can completely change how their mind works. This seems to be the way all brains and minds work, as I have never seen any other way this can work. Adding more to that via the Matrix seems superfluous more than anything else. I mean... What if the being who created the Matrix is in a Matrix of some other being, with that being also existing in a Matrix that exists within other infinite Matrices created by an infinite amount of other beings? I care more about the practical application of an idea, I suppose.

So practically, or what ever manner, how do you account for the Kalam argument?

 

[SigurdReginson]

So practically, or what ever manner, how do you account for the Kalam argument?

I can't really answer that, honestly, as I'm ignorant as to it's intricacies. I like to educate myself on things to a degree I feel comfortable with before forming opinions. Maybe you could share aspects of it that you think I might find useful or could share my thoughts on?

 

[firedragon]

I can't really answer that, honestly, as I'm ignorant as to it's intricacies. I like to educate myself on things to a degree I feel comfortable with before forming opinions. Maybe you could share aspects of it that you think I might find useful or could share my thoughts on?

Logically, can a contingent being exist eternally?

 

[SigurdReginson]

Logically, can a contingent being exist eternally?

I feel like "contingent being" are loaded words. Maybe you could describe what is meant more specifically by "contingent being?" What is this contingent being contingent upon?

 

[firedragon]

I feel like "contingent being" are loaded words. Maybe you could describe what is meant more specifically by "contingent being?" What is this contingent being contingent upon?

A contingent being is contingent upon something. Thats why it's called contingent.

 

[SigurdReginson]

A contingent being is contingent upon something. Thats why it's called contingent.

But if I don't know what it's contingent upon, I have no frame of reference to work with. It's like describing a rock as slightly. Sightly what? Without more information, it can't progress past the point of "rock" according to the frame of reference I have now, and it's status as "slightly" transports this rock into the realm of incomplete information. Doesn't seem too useful to me to form opinions based on incomplete information.

 

[mikkel_the_dane]

I can't really answer that, honestly, as I'm ignorant as to it's intricacies. I like to educate myself on things to a degree I feel comfortable with before forming opinions. Maybe you could share aspects of it that you think I might find useful or could share my thoughts on?

Here is one way to do it.
From Wiki:

...
The most prominent form of the argument, as defended by William Lane Craig, states the Kalam cosmological argument as the following brief syllogism:[4]

1. Everything that begins to exist has a cause.
2. The universe began to exist.
3. Therefore, the universe has a cause.

Given the conclusion, Craig appends a further premise and conclusion based upon a conceptual analysis of the properties of the cause of the universe:[5]

1. The universe has a cause.
2. If the universe has a cause, then an uncaused, personal Creator of the universe exists who sans (without) the universe is beginningless, changeless, immaterial, timeless, spaceless and enormously powerful.
3. Therefore, an uncaused, personal Creator of the universe exists, who sans the universe is beginningless, changeless, immaterial, timeless, spaceless and enormously powerful.

...

I was taught to in part always look for the presumptions. I.e. the hidden assumptions in an argument. So what is the main hidden assumption? That you can trust your subjective experiences of the universe to correspond to the objective; as independent of your experiences; ontology/existence of the universe.
In other words the Matrix and all other variants posses the following problem.
You are caused not just to exist, but have experiences about things not dependent on your thinking/will. I.e. objective reality, but you know that you can be fooled, e.g. hallucinations.
So here it is for a cause:
A - You are caused to have fundamentally correct experiences of the objective universe, i.e. true correspondence.
B - You are caused to have fundamentally incorrect experiences of the objective universe, i.e. no true correspondence.
But if B you can't say anything true of the objective universe and thus you can't know if everything that begins to exist has a cause. That is also true of your rational philosophical arguments because they rest on the assumption that your thinking says something true about the objective universe, yet then you run into B.

Now for epistemology it is foundationalism versus skepticism and the Kalam cosmological argument is foundational in its methodology. It assumes that there are a certain bedrock foundation as a necessary and sufficient type of understanding, for which it can't be different.
As a skeptic I have just learned to hunt for the hidden assumption in any apparently foundational argument.

So you can believe in the Kalam cosmological argument, but it rests on the unprovable assumption that we can trust the universe, whatever the universe otherwise is.

 

[SigurdReginson]

Here is one way to do it.
From Wiki:


I was taught to in part always look for the presumptions. I.e. the hidden assumptions in an argument. So what is the main hidden assumption? That you can trust your subjective experiences of the universe to correspond to the objective; as independent of your experiences; ontology/existence of the universe.
In other words the Matrix and all other variants posses the following problem.
You are caused not just to exist, but have experiences about things not dependent on your thinking/will. I.e. objective reality, but you know that you can be fooled, e.g. hallucinations.
So here it is for a cause:
A - You are caused to have fundamentally correct experiences of the objective universe, i.e. true correspondence.
B - You are caused to have fundamentally incorrect experiences of the objective universe, i.e. no true correspondence.
But if B you can't say anything true of the objective universe and thus you can't know if everything that begins to exist has a cause. That is also true of your rational philosophical arguments because they rest on the assumption that your thinking says something true about the objective universe, yet then you run into B.

Now for epistemology it is foundationalism versus skepticism and the Kalam cosmological argument is foundational in its methodology. It assumes that there are a certain bedrock foundation as a necessary and sufficient type of understanding, for which it can't be different.
As a skeptic I have just learned to hunt for the hidden assumption in any apparently foundational argument.

So you can believe in the Kalam cosmological argument, but it rests on the unprovable assumption that we can trust the universe, whatever the universe otherwise is.

Thank you.

Some problems I have with this that I can identify so far...

1. Everything that begins to exist has a cause.
2. The universe began to exist.
3. Therefore, the universe has a cause.

This relies on incomplete information, as we cannot know "everything." This is an objective premise, and we are subjective beings. It seems like 2D creatures explaining the nature of 3D, IMO.

As for your point about experiences, this is where the illusion of the ego comes in. It seems as though we experience things according to the impulses our brain creates. I could be sitting in a padded cell and doing this all within the confines of my own mind right now via some kind of insane asylum Matrix, but so what?

Ultimately, reality isn't right or wrong, hot or cold, black or white. It just is. My understanding of it is a whole coalition of what my senses gather and what my brain stores for my mind to interpret. What my mind interprets can be wrong, as preposition B posits, but knowing that, I can account for that by testing things according to how they respond within the confines of observable reality - even if that reality is a Matrix. That's all I will ever have to work with. It's flawed, but it is the only experience I can have.

In this respect, I am a 2D creature. I can assume what 3D might be like according to the information I have now, but to what ends? You see, time is the ultimate factor that assigns these pursuits intrinsic value. I can only ever experience a circle, and never a sphere, so why spend time to try to assume what a sphere even is? I'll just make due with my circle unless something of greater value than the time I spend in it's pursuit comes along. Without that return in investment, why invest much into it?