zurew

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No, he did horrible. He dodged many hypotheticals and questions. For example the one where even if he perfectly follows God's moral code, he is still guaranteed to end up in hell - which is a great point showing the scenario where objective morality goes against your own values and interests you wont have any motivation to abide by those moral rules (even if they are objective). He said multiple things that are wrong: He said people cant have different conceptions of God (yes they clearly can) , he said the definition the dude gave is circular(even though it wasn't), he said to end up in a situation where the best choice is to lie, that would indicate that one must have done morally bad things beforehand - which is an insane and clearly wrong claim, his claim about Cardinal Newman defining God as conscience was also wrong. He was bad faith multiple times . Its peculiar, that he understood what other people meant by the Christian God (when he tried to run defense for God making the command to slaughter children in one case) , but in other cases he plays the "I have no clue what you mean by believe and God" Most of the things that you mentioned that he is right about are trivial things that almost no one disagreed with in the firstplace, its just that he redefines terms in a way that misleads everyone. The only thing that was informative and novel and substantive to some atheists is his comment about "purpose and morality cant be found in science". But even thats not as a heavy hitter as he thinks it is, because that doesnt rule out objective morality and purpose being true under atheism and even if he could establish that , that wouldn't be anything more than a pragmatic argument for theism at best.

Also sometimes one big issue is that you are in storytelling mode. "I should have done xyz , I should have achieved xyz , I should have xyz skills, by now". This creates a lot of unnecessary pain. It doesnt matter what your evaluation is , what matters is what you do with what you have right now. The other issue is trying to create always the best possible conditions for any given action - you search for having the right feeling, the right amount of money, the right people etc - you know its like the guys who have a 4 hour morning routine and they pretend that they are productive, even though they could have spent those hours actually focusing on the things that makes a difference - you can use your intuition here, because if you are open, it will tell you generally what you are afraid of and what you are delaying. If you have no idea what you want to do, you still probably have some idea about some of the character traits that you want - take steps that will gradually transform you into the person who embodies those traits. So when it comes a job the question isnt necessarily "What am I getting here?" - the question is (as Jim Rohn said) Who am I becoming here?

This might be garbage, but this sometimes works for me - I would just say try to feel (not think) into what your best version would do in this given moment right now. Even if you have 0 idea what "best version" means for you, you will probably have a general rough intuition about it and you can start to get into that headspace, whatever that headspace is.

Im not sure how any of that responds to the issues I brought up. The issue isn't that he uses a unique definition, the issue is that he uses two different definitions for the same term (equivocation). Btw the funny thing is that Leo would object to almost everything that you said there. He rejects the apriori aposteriori, and the analytic synthetic distinctions. He would also reject your characterization of God , because when he invokes that term he doesn't mean an abstract object. The other funny thing is that Leo would be categorized as a hardcore empiricist - he is the one who holds the position that you can solve and settle metaphysical issues with purely empirical investigation (and validate things for yourself) and there is no need for arguments and debates. I think you conflate "modern epistemologists " with casual scientists (and even there I would be catious what positions they hold), but as you outlined scientists are generally not philosophers and not into epistemology and philosophy of science - but philosophers who are into those things , they also study metaphysics , so im not sure what would be the futility in engaging with them. The general notion how philosophers are characterized on this forum is just wrong. This is thanks to Leo's charaterization of them, where we pretend that most academic philosophers are retarded , white belt atheists or theists, but thats just not the case.

I think that intuition can mislead you, and one reason why is because you are precisely not aware of all the possible deductions that can be made from one claim or from a set of claims. (not just consciously unaware, but subconsciously unaware as well - there are limits to the subconscious mind) You narrow down the possibility space (pre-judge where the relevant things will be) and you run your intuition within that narrowed frame and you draw your conclusions from there , but the conclusions that you draw are not necessarily deductively valid (you give up on 100% certainty - but most cases we dont even need that level of certainty anyway). Thats the price that you pay once you purely rely on intuition. This is why your intuition can quickly become bias and can mislead you. The way John Vervaeke would say - the things that make you adaptive are the things that make you prone to self-deception. Intuition makes us really adaptive, but it also makes us prone to self-deception and bs. Thats not to say that intuition isn't really powerful and useful - it is, especially if it is specialized - there are reasons why experts dont need to formalize things and cant often times explicate how they do the things they do or how they solve problems so effectively - they can use vibes and say "obviously thats the issue" and then proceed to solve a problem that a team of newbies couldn't figure out and where the solution isn't at all obvious to them.

One problem is equivocation. He uses the term in two different senses which leads to confusion. (for example in his blog post, he said that scientists would stop being scientists if they would recognize what he says - how could that possibly be the case if he uses a definition of science that encompasses the things he said about epistemology and metaphysics). The other issue with his equivocation (that isn't applicable in this specific case, but in other cases it is), is that he isn't reponding to the position others have, because he uses the same terms with a completely different meaning . If you have a position that I would want to criticize I would first want to make sure that I respond to your position (the way you mean it and the way you use those terms) and not the way what I would prefer certain terms to mean. If by X you mean your horse and you say that X has 4 legs and I respond with "you stupid guy , how could my finger (X) have four legs?", then Im not really interacting with your claim, I created a completely new separate claim that you dont even hold. The other obvious issue is with the normative part, thats where the meat of the issue is and thats where the substantive debate is "what it means for science to be proper and what it means for a scientist to be a good scientist , what kind of epistemic norms should science be defined by" - you cant just grab the label "proper" and put behind the epistemology that you intuitively like, thats not how debates work and thats not how establishing a truth claim works. There are other issues with lumping all scientists together and assuming what metaphysical stance and what philosophy of science stance they have. There is also an issue with him not being able to substantiate certain claims - like the claim that not knowing all metaphysical truths will limit how much you can do with science. He took issue with me saying that only certain metaphysical truths have relevance to how science is done and how much can be achieved with science.

I did, did you? I agree that thats what science is, Leo disagrees, he likes to use a definition of science that ecompasses all philosophy and he is normatively loading it with the label "proper" science. And I also agree that he is doing metaphysics not science.

Yes and hence why you can never solve deep metaphysical disagreements with the method of falsification. And you can falsify further and further and maintain a bunch of metaphysical beliefs. When you use falsification you already pressupose that thats the right epistemic way to go about things. If someone presses you why you take falsification over any other thing, you are stumbled (even though thats where the substance and interesting thought-provoking debates would be) - for clarification by "you" im not talking about specifically you there.

So to recap one more time No argument was successfully made that would establish how knowing all metaphysical truths is necessary to progress in science. No argument was made that would show how having the stance that definitions cant exhaustively describe things is relevant to science and to the progression of science. There was no good response to the issue of adapting frames forever and hence why never needing to drop certain metaphysical beliefs. The response was "there is no good reason for x" - but even if that is granted, that doesn't necessitate dropping the frame, because you don't establish contradiction in their view - so the frame can be maintained further. There were certain things established that are all non-controversial, trivially true things that no one challenged in the firstplace. The idea that one needs to question their paradigm is a completely non-controversial claim that anyone who is even remotely into philosophy of science understands.

Thats an example where it does have practical implications, but its not at all clear thats the case with the other question or with all questions and stances. For that to work you would need to have only one logically possible hypothesis, but thats just never the case. And even general relativity is subject to reevaluation and recontextualization

To be clear - originally the way you framed things and the implication was that having your metaphysical frame is whats necessary to do science to work and to progress in science. Now we walked that all back into - in the vast majority of pragmatic cases, you dont need any of that and you can have mutually exclusive metaphysical views and still progress in science and achieve great things. Now you even walked back the idea that for a TOE to work in physics you would need to know all metaphysical truths and framed establishing a TOE (the way it is usually defined by physicists) as "shallow" . The gravity of your orginial claims are almost non-existent now when it comes to the pragmatic evaluation and implication of things. Notice that when you are cornered about issues of pragmatism, you resort to the rhetorical move of labeling it shallow and other things, because you realize that none of your thing is pragmatically necessary and shit can work perfectly well without you and your fancy work.

It can be silly, but not logically impossible - and hence the frame can be forever maintained and one can always say that there is a corner in the Universe where there is one unicorn or that there is a hidden dimension or that the Unicorn is invisible etc.

That just seems to validate what I said about not needing to drop certain things. You can maintain the belief that there is an external mind independent reality and you can have the view that there isn't a mind independent reality and a bunch of experiments and results will be compatible with both of those.

You frame it as an absolute when its not (again its sometimes true and its only true for a small subset of beliefs), and you seem to ignore the evolution of frames. Its not like you see the frames dropping as science progresses "Okay, there are no more christians guys - in order to do science you have to drop your belief in the Christian God". You can have a modern atheist and a modern christian be much more aligned on everything that has to do with science and the epistemology of science than a modern christian and a christian from 2000 years ago. To me it seems clear that there are change resistant metaphysical beliefs, that you won't ever need to reflect upon no matter what kind of experiment is conducted or done. You can maintain those forever, because you can almost always recontextualize things. And the reason why is because categorically you cant rule out all alternative hypotheses. The dissapearance of your shoes will be always compatible with a creature coming from a different dimension stealing it.

You are making it normative when it doesnt have to be. If by TOE we just mean a theory that can connect quantum theory and relativity , then explain to us how knowing all metaphysical facts would be relevant there? No im concerned with checking what kind of arguments we are working with and wondering why take certain views when you dont have to. You can maintain all your positions about God being true, omniscience being true and still not endorse the view that knowing all metaphysical facts is necessary for the creation of TOE. I dont understand how you get to that conclusion. The point is that in order for two people to run the same experiment they dont need to share the exact same set of metaphysical beliefs, they might align on certain things ,but not on the vast majority of things.

The point is if your definition of "total understanding" includes those things then it is trivially true. A non-trivially true move would be establishing how a TOE(Theory of everything) for physics would necessitate knowing all metaphysical facts.

We can speculate on the motivations - but I think its clear that it doesn't have to be something metaphysical (for example, it could be money), but even if it did have to do with metaphyiscs , the idea would be that they share some set of those beliefs (that are relevant to run the experiment) ,but when it comes to the other beliefs they hold, they disagree on those.

But there you are just making a trivial claim, a claim that is true by definition. "If you want to know all facts, including all metaphysical facts, then you need to know all metaphysical facts". But this is different from pragmatic goals.

They are irrelevant with respect to specific goals. Want to check how far you can throw a ball? The variable "Are you a Christian" wont be there and wont hold any weight.

Im not sure what you are trying to ask there. "What is the reason to run the experiment that leads to a discovery" or do you try to ask "What is the reason to run thought experiements ?"

That is compatible with not all facts being relevant to the manipulation of the Universe. Right, will wait on you pointing out the wrong things I said, and if you cant I will take it that you have no clue what you are talking about. Just like you had no arguments to establish Solipsism in the other thread and made a bunch of points that were compatible with non-solipsism as well.

Some of it is relevant, but the vast majority isn't. We can run down thought experiements where two scientists run the same experiement that leads to a new discovery (even though they have a bunch of mutally exclusive metaphysical beliefs).

You assert this ,but I dont think you have a supporting argument for it. Especially when it comes to predicting things, we ignore a lot of info ( I can make predictions about how a body will move without knowing what color it has, or whether it is sentient or not or any other random thing). This is also why certain equations are so elegant. There is a fuck ton of info reduction happening there.

I dont think thats true. Some of it will be relevant, but not all of it.