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What if I’m wrong? (2023)

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Re: What if I’m wrong? (2023)

#201

Post by tsunamifury »

passion__desire wrote: post #197
randomdata wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I wish more people would help me be “constructively wrong” What's the value proposition? As you noted, not even your own wife will help you until she sees some kind of return for herself (abating her tiredness). Online actors pointing out irrelevant wrongness get to laugh at the meltdown of the maladjusted "intellectual" that usually follows. This is what consultancy is for. You pay someone to look at what you are…

Which is why we need chatgpt as a thought buddy! Chatgpt can route insights it gained from one chat and insert into another chat with a different person. That is learning afterall. Most of insights are memoized in some sense, we don't derive them from first principles again and again.

I built allofus.ai for that! Try it! Long term memory and 8 different perspectives based on real people.

Re: What if I’m wrong? (2023)

#202

Post by randomdata »

tsunamifury wrote: post #200
randomdata wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As before, I am humoured by the meltdown, which has not failed to disappoint. There is no other value proposition online.

I’m merely saying I also have done that. I think you’re a troll and looking at your comments you seem to engage totally disingenuously with HN.

> I’m merely saying I also have done that.

It seems you haven't. Apparently you've exchanged money for something, but apparently not what you were actually looking for. It seems, based on the description provided, that you just wanted to give away free money to whomever was willing to take it. What value proposition have you offered to get someone to actually point out where you are wrong?

> I think you’re a troll

I cannot be a troll. If I were, you would not feed me. It is likely I am disingenuous – but that's the whole charm here. One comes here because they want to interact with screen names, not people. A screen name implies nothing of what lies behind it. It could be an LLM for all anyone cares. Decidedly, it is not intended to be a real person. If a real person is pulling the knobs and levers behind the scenes, that's merely an implementation detail of the software.

> and looking at your comments

Well now I wonder what I wrote that made you think my other comments would be something worth reading?

Re: What if I’m wrong? (2023)

#203

Post by [deleted] »

Ensorceled wrote: post #189
gwd wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This is inside out. What evidence was presented to you that made you believe Christianity was right? It sounds like maybe some people are taking this as a challenge from me to atheists. I'm not really; just like Dennet is in TFA, I'm talking about general principles for someone trying to live as a rational creature: each of us should examine our own beliefs, and not only ask "What if I'm wrong?" but "How would I kn…

> It sounds like maybe some people are taking this as a challenge from me to atheists. Not at all, I'm engaging in good faith here. > This seems a bit strange to me... so the Romans believed in supernatural beings, and the Christians also believed in supernatural beings (and of course so did the Greeks, and the Persians, and the Babylonians, and the Egyptians, and...); but instead of this being evidence that there we…

[deleted]

Re: What if I’m wrong? (2023)

#204

Post by imtringued »

pitaj wrote: post #68
roenxi wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On the topic of opinion masquerading as fact - if you check the dynamics there it quickly gets quite interesting. Political arguments are unusual if they involve an expert. On the big ones (economics, medical, military and technical policy) it is relatively rare to see an expert and doubly rare to find one who isn't pushing some sort of agenda. There tends to be a tiny pool of people doing a speaking circuit that tur…

> The biggest economic miracle of our time is China's industrial policy and it isn't particularly obvious what the facts about that are. I'm not sure exactly what you're referring to, but I think it's pretty well understood that the growth of China is thanks to the market reforms in the 70s and 80s.

Yeah, but it's not market reforms advised by the WTO, IMF, neoclassical economists or capitalist countries. If anything, they are bending the rules as much as possible, to the point that the market aspect is a red herring. It's not just a market economy.

Re: What if I’m wrong? (2023)

#206

Post by geye1234 »

gwd wrote: post #147
Ensorceled wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I've thought very carefully on what kind of evidence could be presented to me to show that Christianity was wrong This is inside out. What evidence was presented to you that made you believe Christianity was right? I became an Atheist in large part because I took Latin my first year in high school and realized that the Roman's actually believed in their gods the same way that I believed in the Christian god. And I…

> This is inside out. What evidence was presented to you that made you believe Christianity was right? It sounds like maybe some people are taking this as a challenge from me to atheists. I'm not really; just like Dennet is in TFA, I'm talking about general principles for someone trying to live as a rational creature: each of us should examine our own beliefs, and not only ask "What if I'm wrong?" but "How would I kn…

> As for me, I've got what I consider to be more objectively sound reasons to believe; but "“I have discovered a truly marvelous proof of this, which however [this comment] is not large enough to contain.” Hopefully at some point I'll write it up in a way that's easy to link to.

I think Aquinas's essence-existence distinction, once one understands it (and understands and accepts its premises) is sound. It's impossible to summarise in a combox though, mainly because its philosophical background is very different from the place most people are coming from; so quite a bit of preliminary work needs to happen before it can be understood.

Aristotle's unmoved mover is also sound; there's one point of detail I'm a bit hazy about, but it the main it works. Again, some preliminary work also needed.

Re: What if I’m wrong? (2023)

#207

Post by geye1234 »

cksquare wrote: post #88
gwd wrote: post #79

I think the more important question is, "How would I know if I were wrong?" As a thinking Christian, and I've thought very carefully on what kind of evidence could be presented to me to show that Christianity was wrong; I'd be interested in what kind of evidence Dennet would accept to show him that his atheism was wrong.

This is the tired kind of equivocating that's used by lazy Christians to claim atheism is a discrete and well-formed ideology. Atheism is just that, a-theism, a rejection of the notion of a supernatural dimension occupied by 'personal' god(s). What evidence (or counter-evidence) do you suggest I present to show that my disbelief in Thor or Odin is wrong?

> What evidence (or counter-evidence) do you suggest I present to show that my disbelief in Thor or Odin is wrong?

There are no attempts at proof (that I'm aware of) for the existence of these mythical deities. There are several for the existence of the God of monotheism, which I believe to be sound, but will struggle to fit into a combox.

Further, the thing we imagine them to be is different in kind from the God of monotheism. There are sound explanations of why this is so, but (again) they won't fit into a combox.

See Edward Feser's Five Proofs for the Existence of God, and some of his other works, if you care to explore this further. Dawkins, Dennett, Hitchens and the like ignore, or grossly straw-man, these arguments.

Re: What if I’m wrong? (2023)

#208

Post by geye1234 »

Scubabear68 wrote: post #85
gwd wrote: post #79

I think the more important question is, "How would I know if I were wrong?" As a thinking Christian, and I've thought very carefully on what kind of evidence could be presented to me to show that Christianity was wrong; I'd be interested in what kind of evidence Dennet would accept to show him that his atheism was wrong.

I think the very definition of Christianity is that you are accepting the creed on faith. There really aren’t any claims you can verify or falsify until after you die (or during the special time of the Rapture).

This is false. There are thorough proofs (or, to avoid the success-word, attempts at proof) for God's existence. They are ignored or misunderstood by the popular atheists like Dawkins and Dennett. They are impossible to summarise in a combox or pithy comment but the information is out there if you care to look. [0]

There are also miracles with thousands of witnesses, most notably that at Fatima. The witnesses included not just Catholics, but also Protestants, atheists and those of other religions. https://www.basicincome.com/bp/files/Meet_the_Witnesses.pdf

[0] See Edward Feser's Five Proofs

Re: What if I’m wrong? (2023)

#209

Post by PaulDavisThe1st »

jibalt wrote: post #161
PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had an interesting email exchange with Dennett in the 90s. He had just brought out his book "Consciousness Explained". I read it and emailed him a short note saying that I thought the book was mistitled - the contents were an explanation of what we were conscious of not how we could be conscious. I expected him to write back with some eloquent or witty or pithy defense of the link between the title and the contents…

Dan was toying with you ... his thesis was on the distinction between consciousness and the contents of consciousness, and he more than anyone was familiar with the point you were making (erroneously).

You're welcome to your opinion. At that time. I had read pretty much everything Dennett had published (books, papers etc), and I didn't/don't share your position. But YMMV.

Re: What if I’m wrong? (2023)

#210

Post by DiscourseFan »

jibalt wrote: post #193
DiscourseFan wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ok, but there is only one circle

Obviously not.

If there were two circles, the second would be isomorphic to the first, therefore, in pure geometry there is only one circle. I suppose by some sort of empirical measure, there would be circles of different sizes, but as we already stated, empirically observed circles are actually ellipses, so in fact there is actually only one circle.
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