Refuting the Matrix Argument (Or: Why Stoned College Kids Make Bad Philosophers)

[Betterave]

First off, I notice that you skipped over the meat of the issue and sought diversion in the dictionary. Here’s the question you skipped answering and really shouldn’t have:
So what distinguishes the two cases? Is the distinction captured by the claim that there is a PRACTICABLE hypothesis in one case, but not in the other? Is that a primitive distinction, or is this distinction derived from a logically prior distinction? (Please seriously ask yourself this question.)

Uh, yeah, here’s Webster:
Nothing like that in what you are saying. No “formal possession”, or admittance as a member, no initiation, no enrollment. It’s just handwaving toward some imaginary “induction” to an imaginary “community”.

There is plenty “like that” in what I have said. Maybe you ought to read it again and ask some specific questions about what I wrote, if you really are unable to understand (as opposed to not wanting to understand).

I’m unfamiliar with the term “knowledge community”. Seems like this isn’t what you are talking about. What, then? I looked at several of the first few pages of hits on Google for “knowledge community” and didn’t come up with anything that fits what you are talking about, let alone some form of this that has some induction process or enrollment ceremony for science or its methods (let alone something that would apply to a teenage tribesman in Papua New Guinea!).

Well it’s a tricky term. It breaks down into to separate terms: “knowl” and “edge community.” Does that help?
But seriously, the meaning of a term is determined by how it is used. You have to actually look at and try to understand how I’m using the term if you want to know what it means. A knowledge community is a group of people that share some ‘form of life’ (e.g., hunting, biological research, working at McDonald’s, finite element research, holding a high school diploma) to which there pertains a particular set of acquired competencies (knowledge).

Practicability just means “doable”, able to be put in practice. It’s not a function of community, it’s just the state of being capable of put to a practical test. A kid stranded on a desert island could come up with a hypothesis, perhaps as to why certain fish came into the shallows at certain times of the year (to spawn, perhaps), and then test that via experiment and observation. There’s no “knowledge community”, there’s no “induction”, it’s just a single young man putting testable ideas into practice.

That’s obviously true about the kid, and obviously irrelevant. The young man has *obviously *already been inducted into a knowledge community if he has the wherewithal to come up with such an hypothesis.
Practicability certainly is a function of community. Your denial of this is so completely absurd I hardly know what to say. Man can barely even subsist apart from community, never mind build knowledge, along with its rather conspicuous by-products, such as (your favorite) airplanes, grocery stores, the stock market, the pyramids, the nation state, etc.

Science benefits greatly from community, at least because it provides the basis for cross-checking and objectivity, but a hypothesis needs no “induction” into any “community” to be “justiifed”. It just needs to be doable, testable, that’s all.

But that is an absurd and false claim, as my examples have already shown!

You’re totally missing the point: What distinguishes “nonsense symbols” from “non-nonsense symbols”? You treat these as primitive notions, natural categories, givens; but they clearly are not. What does the status of some token of possible symbols depend upon?

Language, of course. If you can’t understand the symbols, you can’t make sense of them, by definition. If you understand the symbols, and can match concepts to them, concepts which can be put in practice for empirical testing, you’re good. If it’s a language you don’t understand, you’re hosed.

So you want to say that the status of some token of possible symbols (i.e., possible language) depends upon language, of course? LOL! That’s quite an explanation. In other words, what determines whether you can understand a set of symbols, i.e., a linguistic utterance or inscription? Language! Language determines whether you can understand language or not! Of course, why didn’t I think of that! Great explanation.

 

[Betterave]

test

 

[Betterave]

First off, I notice that you skipped over the meat of the issue and sought diversion in the dictionary. Here’s the question you skipped answering and really shouldn’t have:
So what distinguishes the two cases? Is the distinction captured by the claim that there is a PRACTICABLE hypothesis in one case, but not in the other? Is that a primitive distinction, or is this distinction derived from a logically prior distinction? (Please seriously ask yourself this question.)

Uh, yeah, here’s Webster:
Nothing like that in what you are saying. No “formal possession”, or admittance as a member, no initiation, no enrollment. It’s just handwaving toward some imaginary “induction” to an imaginary “community”.

There is plenty “like that” in what I have said. Maybe you ought to read it again and ask some specific questions about what I wrote, if you really are unable to understand (as opposed to not wanting to understand).

I’m unfamiliar with the term “knowledge community”. Seems like this isn’t what you are talking about. What, then? I looked at several of the first few pages of hits on Google for “knowledge community” and didn’t come up with anything that fits what you are talking about, let alone some form of this that has some induction process or enrollment ceremony for science or its methods (let alone something that would apply to a teenage tribesman in Papua New Guinea!).

Well it’s a tricky term. It breaks down into to separate terms: “knowl” and “edge community.” Does that help?
But seriously, the meaning of a term is determined by how it is used. You have to actually look at and try to understand how I’m using the term if you want to know what it means. A knowledge community is a group of people that share some ‘form of life’ (e.g., hunting, biological research, working at McDonald’s, finite element research, holding a high school diploma) to which there pertains a particular set of acquired competencies (knowledge).

Practicability just means “doable”, able to be put in practice. It’s not a function of community, it’s just the state of being capable of put to a practical test. A kid stranded on a desert island could come up with a hypothesis, perhaps as to why certain fish came into the shallows at certain times of the year (to spawn, perhaps), and then test that via experiment and observation. There’s no “knowledge community”, there’s no “induction”, it’s just a single young man putting testable ideas into practice.

That’s obviously true about the kid, and obviously irrelevant. The young man has *obviously *already been inducted into a knowledge community if he has the wherewithal to come up with such an hypothesis.
Practicability certainly is a function of community. Your denial of this is so completely absurd I hardly know what to say. Man can barely even subsist apart from community, never mind build knowledge, along with its rather conspicuous by-products, such as (your favorite) airplanes, grocery stores, the stock market, the pyramids, the nation state, etc.

Science benefits greatly from community, at least because it provides the basis for cross-checking and objectivity, but a hypothesis needs no “induction” into any “community” to be “justiifed”. It just needs to be doable, testable, that’s all.

But that is an absurd and false claim, as my examples have already shown!

You’re totally missing the point: What distinguishes “nonsense symbols” from “non-nonsense symbols”? You treat these as primitive notions, natural categories, givens; but they clearly are not. What does the status of some token of possible symbols depend upon?

Language, of course. If you can’t understand the symbols, you can’t make sense of them, by definition. If you understand the symbols, and can match concepts to them, concepts which can be put in practice for empirical testing, you’re good. If it’s a language you don’t understand, you’re hosed.

So you want to say that the status of some token of possible symbols (i.e., possible language) depends upon language, of course? LOL! That’s quite an explanation. In other words, what determines whether you can understand a set of symbols, i.e., a linguistic utterance or inscription? Language! Language determines whether you can understand language or not! Of course, why didn’t I think of that! Great explanation.

 

[Betterave]

It’s working again! - sorry about the quadruplicate posting. My hypothesis is that the data-base pixies were messing with this thread, but they’ve gone somewhere else now.

 

[Joseph_Kemp]

You wrote: “…we know that in the world revealed by our senses, there is insufficient evidence to accept the claim that gods exist.”

That is quite correct. There is not enough evidence to prove that God exists.

There IS some evidence for the existence of God. But there is not enough evidence to place the existence of God BEYOND A REASONABLE DOUBT. There are still plenty of reasons to doubt God’s existence. That is why faith is necessary for belief in God. It is all we really have at this point.

There is one very simple reason why people choose to believe in God. We humans are highly ordered creatures. We are capable of putting a great deal of order into the world. We build roads and cars to drive on them. We create traffic laws. We organize farms to grow food.

But if one looks at the natural world, there is already a great deal of order in it. The seasons follow a certain pattern. Trees grow a certain way. One day follows the next. Animals migrate annually. Highly ordered. Highly structured.

Since humans are capable of imposing order on nature because of our highly ordered minds, and since there is already a great deal of order present in the natural world, it is thus reasonable to believe that perhaps this order in nature was ALSO placed there by a highly ordered mind – a God of some sort. Perhaps.

This evidence is not conclusive in any way. It is not enough to place the existence of God beyond a reasonable doubt. It proves nothing. But it DOES make belief in God somewhat more reasonable than not. And that is as far as anyone can reasonably go at this point, to my knowledge.

You said: “Sometimes, these Matrix-mongers…say something as asinine like “To use science, you have to have faith that it works! All systems of knowledge have faith at their root!” Obviously, that statement is false – …there is quite a lot of evidence that evidence-based inquiry (of which science is a subset) works.”

This is also quite true. But not absolutely true. The idea that science “works” is true beyond a reasonable doubt. Meaning that there is no good reason to doubt it. But this does not imply absolute truth.

Scientists often claim that science makes no assumptions - that everything must be based on evidence. But science itself makes one very large assumption. It assumes that the universe is humanly understandable. And it may simply be that this is not the case.

You mentioned a question often asked by “Matrix-loving teenagers”: “What evidence do you have that there’s a real world outside of your mind?"

If we were living in the Matrix, we’d first have to PROVE that we were living in the Matrix. And there is absolutely no useful way to do that. It’s not a testable theory. And that makes it a very bad theory.

GOOD theories are testable. They lead to new information. They unify our knowledge. They open new questions that nobody has ever asked before.

But the belief that we are living in the Matrix does none of those things. It is untestable, unlikely, and unprovable. It leads to no new information. It does not unify our knowledge. It opens NO new questions that may help us understand anything about our world. And thus as a theory, it is quite useless. And on top of it all, it cannot be tested. There is absolutely no benefit in believing in it, in any way. And again, that makes it a very bad theory. We are therefore rationally justified in believing that we are not living in the Matrix.

Of course, it IS possible that we ARE living in the Matrix. But there is no good reason for believing that we are. Until I see some compelling evidence, I will not believe. There is no reason to. Just because something is possible doesn’t mean that it is PROBABLE. In this case, the probability is extraordinarily low.

Also, it’s just plain simpler to believe that we are living in a real world, with real people in it. I look around me, and there it is. That’s easier than believing we are living in the Matrix, which is unlikely, untestable, and unproven. The idea that we are living in a real world with real people is the simplest explanation of our sensory experience. And as Occam’s Razor says, the simplest explanation is usually the best.

Incidentally, AntiTheist, I am guessing you are a philosophy professor. A philosophy professor would likely be in a position day after day to hear students griping about whether they live in the “real world” or not. There is no need to confirm this. It is just a guess, which I find highly likely to be true.

You wrote: “It’s all “faith” to these Matrix-mongers, which means they live in a completely irrational world, which is ironically what so many people accuse atheists of doing.”

There is a problem I have with atheism. It is a problem of logic. Many atheists I have encountered believe that the Universe came from “nothing.” I cannot understand this.

Rationally speaking, something cannot come from nothing. This is a logically contradictory idea. It is absolutely impossible. Even as a pure concept alone, it is impossible. There is no known logic sequence for explaining how something can emerge from nothingness. And thus we are not rationally justified in believing it.

Perhaps you do not hold this position. In which case I would be very interested in hearing your explanation.

 

[MindOverMatter2]

You wrote: “…we know that in the world revealed by our senses, there is insufficient evidence to accept the claim that gods exist.”

That is quite correct. There is not enough evidence to prove that God exists.

There IS some evidence for the existence of God. But there is not enough evidence to place the existence of God BEYOND A REASONABLE DOUBT. There are still plenty of reasons to doubt God’s existence. That is why faith is necessary for belief in God. It is all we really have at this point.

.

This is not true.

 

[Joseph_Kemp]

Read further. I say:

There is one very simple reason why people choose to believe in God. We humans are highly ordered creatures. We are capable of putting a great deal of order into the world. We build roads and cars to drive on them. We create traffic laws. We organize farms to grow food.

But if one looks at the natural world, there is already a great deal of order in it. The seasons follow a certain pattern. Trees grow a certain way. One day follows the next. Animals migrate annually. Highly ordered. Highly structured.

Since humans are capable of imposing order on nature because of our highly ordered minds, and since there is already a great deal of order present in the natural world, it is thus reasonable to believe that perhaps this order in nature was ALSO placed there by a highly ordered mind – a God of some sort. Perhaps.

This evidence is not conclusive in any way. It is not enough to place the existence of God beyond a reasonable doubt. It proves nothing. But it DOES make belief in God somewhat more reasonable than not. And that is as far as anyone can reasonably go at this point, to my knowledge.

Anyone who believes otherwise, as far as I can tell, is flatly wrong.

 

[Ismael]

Sorry to resurrect this but I saw the matrix recently

When people talk about the world and make claims about the world, they’re not making metaphysical declarations: they’re discussing the consistent world revealed by our senses. In other words, “the real world” is the label that people put on the consistent world revealed by our senses.
…

For example, let’s pretend that the world that our senses reveal to us is actually a complex computer simulation being fed into my brain – which is in a vat, of course – by a mad scientist in some other “real world.” All of that wouldn’t change the fact that we know that in the world revealed by our senses, evidence tells us that objects fall at the rate of 32 feet per second per second (on this planet, anyway). All of that wouldn’t change the fact that we know that in the world revealed by our senses

This argument, after eliminating the useless ramblings and stupid jabs at faith and God, is still fallacious. As one would have to prove the senses are always accurate or at least reliable.

But then according to what stated above we get a circular argument of the sort:
the senses are reliable if they correspond to the real world; to determine what is the real world I use my senses.

It does not make… sense.

The point is that indeed no one argues we live in the Matrix in the first place, except stoned kids and people who took Kant way too far

The fact is, when we talk about whether a claim is true or not, we’re talking about whether or not that claim corresponds to the world revealed by our senses --** if something is “true” and doesn’t correspond to the world revealed by our senses, then you have no basis at all for saying that it’s true. **And the only way to determine if a claim corresponds to the world revealed by our senses is to measure it against data from the world revealed by our senses. If you’ve got a better way to arrive at knowledge, I’d like to hear it – and I’d like to know how you know it’s a better way.

That is usually true. Yet there are things that have nothing to do with our senses.

The most reliable knowledge in my opinion is Mathematics… and mathematics is not something proven by the senses, or experiments, but by logic alone! Sure some parts of math might be ‘testable’… but when you are dealing with infinite Hilbert Spaces or complex calculus… it’s another story.

Basically what the person here tries to sell us repackaged with the Matrix is “Logical Positivism” in the form of:

“Everything that cannot be proven true by the senses is false/irrelevant”

The problem is that this very statement cannot be proven by the senses… hence irrelevant and incoherent.

Of course Ayer and other ‘fathers’ of logical positivism realized themselves that logical positivism was incoherent as abandoned it for some softer form of positivism.

This arguments, in the end, means little and belongs with the aphorism of “Stoned College Kids Make Bad Philosophers”

 

[PetrusRomanus]

Nevermind that most of the stoned college kids are atheists and “anti theists”