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

[tjkozinski]

That all that exists is material is itself not provable by empirical evidence, for if there were to be something immaterial in existence, only its effects and perhaps the necessity of its existence could be inferred from material objects. But the actual immaterial object could not be perceived by the senses. So, it could certainly exists, but the materialist/empiricist would simply be unable to see it due to his reality-shrunken purview.

So, since “all that exists is material” is itself a judgment about the non-existence of immaterial beings, and is itself not a material object or a necessary logical deduction from the nature or properties of any material object, if one is a pure empiricist, it is self-contradictory to assert pure empiricism as if one knew it to be true.

The dilemma can be solved, but only by rejecting pure empiricism, which is an incoherent position. Better to accept the Aristotelian/Thomistic position that everything we know has its origin in sense knowledge, but we can conclude from what we first know via the senses the existence and nature of supra-sensible realities.

How? Well, first give up your dogmatic empiricism, and then you will be open to how.

 

[AntiTheist]

That all that exists is material is itself not provable by empirical evidence

But no one is claiming that here. I’m not even claiming that the world that we perceive is “real” in some metaphysical sense.

I define the real world as the world that we experience (and that other apparently experience) that it is possible to be wrong about. That’s the world I’m talking about. Whether there’s some other world out there or some immaterial world out there is utterly beside the point.

Now I only believe in the world we experience becauase there’s no evidence that any other world even exists. I don’t deny that “other realities” could exist, but I submit that there’s no good reason to think that they do and that even if they did, it wouldn’t affect the way we evaluate claims in this reality, the one I label as “the real world.”

The dilemma can be solved, but only by rejecting pure empiricism, which is an incoherent position. Better to accept the Aristotelian/Thomistic position that everything we know has its origin in sense knowledge, but we can conclude from what we first know via the senses the existence and nature of supra-sensible realities.

How do you propose to demonstrate, through the senses, that supra-sensible realities exist?

Well, first give up your dogmatic empiricism, and then you will be open to how.

Ok, give it up and then do what? What method of coming to conclusions are you suggesting here, and what makes you think that it is a consistently reliable method that you are proposing?

 

[tjkozinski]

How do you know that what you experience is the fullness of reality? I don’t know that what I experience is the fullness of reality, or even reality at all, either, for I am very capable of misreading my experience of of distorting it willfully for irrational and evil purposes. But that’s why I trust in divine revelation and the help of grace (as well as rational deliberation and conversation and inquiry–aided by grace–), not my own autonomous and solipsistic experience, to define the limits of what can be known, experienced, and participated in, and to provide access to the real reality I am, on my own, not able to access and participate in.

Why do you accept such an individualist and rationally autonomous view of reality and knowledge? This shows your preference for the Enlightenment Tradition, but why be attached to that Tradition? It’s not exactly a self-evidently true one. By default, our culture is Enlightenment, modernist, secularist, immanentist, materialist, gnostic, eroticist, and individualist, and unless we struggle to resist its habituating power, we end up devotees of its “traditional” practices and teachings. Why buy this tradition? It leaves us on our own own, while it brainwashes us to think we are okay on our own, showing he who has eyes to see that we are not really okay on our own at all–but it lies about this. Why be such a conservative? Why not be a real subversive and a radical? Why not participate in a tradition of rationality that admits it is a tradition and does not say that we are okay on our own? That would be an honest tradition. Secularist liberalism is a liar.

The world is greater than our personal experience of it, which tends to be shrunken and partial and distorted by our self-absorption and self-deceptions, and our psychological and spiritual traumas of our past. I think personal experience itself shows us the inadequacy of personal experience. What we need then, to escape from Plato’s cave of shadows masking as reality, is to participate in a reality that is greater than one measured by our limited, finite, distorting minds. This is what all the major religions promise to provide.

All of them cannot be equal in this, so reason tells us that one of them may very well be the “true” religion, providing the greatest and most accurate experience of this supra-personal reality and the best access to it. How to decide which God to get to know, and why? Again, that’s a question that can only be asked and answered once one gives up the cowardly and reality-shrinking and love-less and dishonest tradition of enlightenment modernism and postmodernism.

 

[Monte_RCMS]

Haven’t read every post yet, but wanted to mark this place.

It’s not just the Matrix.

It’s also Harry Potter and all science fiction. [Ever notice that on Star Trek and Star Wars, there is no “organized religion”? No Jesus. No Catholicism. No Mass. No religious services. “Occasionally”, there is “the shephard” or “the rev”. The long ago discontinued sci-fi program “Firefly” had one character as presumably a priest, “a shephard”.

Ron Glass as … www.FireflyWiki.org | Firefly / Shepherd Book

Star Trek had one character as an on-board “counsellor”/ psychologist.

And there was one program that did have a religious group but they had a rock that glowed.

So, life for those folks was a one series of mystical cosmological experiences.

Anyway, here is how one former college student expressed his view of Jesus, and sin:

In 2004, he gave an interview to Cathleen Falsani who was the religion reporter at the Chicago Sun-Times. I must say the whole interview is remarkable. Below are some parts of it where Obama talks about Jesus, heaven and sin. The whole interview can be read here.

(GG is God Girl aka Cathleen Falsani)
GG: Who’s Jesus to you?

OBAMA: Right. Jesus is a historical figure for me, and he’s also a bridge between God and man, in the Christian faith, and one that I think is powerful precisely because he serves as that means of us reaching something higher. And he’s also a wonderful teacher. I think it’s important for all of us, of whatever faith, to have teachers in the flesh and also teachers in history.

GG: The conversation stopper, when you say you’re a Christian and leave it at that.

OBAMA: Where do you move forward with that? This is something that I’m sure I’d have serious debates with my fellow Christians about. I think that the difficult thing about any religion, including Christianity, is that at some level there is a call to evangelize and prostelytize. There’s the belief, certainly in some quarters, that people haven’t embraced Jesus Christ as their personal savior that they’re going to hell.

GG: You don’t believe that?

OBAMA: I find it hard to believe that my God would consign four-fifths of the world to hell. I can’t imagine that my God would allow some little Hindu kid in India who never interacts with the Christian faith to somehow burn for all eternity. That’s just not part of my religious makeup.

Part of the reason I think it’s always difficult for public figures to talk about this is that the nature of politics is that you want to have everybody like you and project the best possible traits onto you. Oftentimes that’s by being as vague as possible, or appealing to the lowest commong denominators. The more specific and detailed you are on issues as personal and fundamental as your faith, the more potentially dangerous it is.

GG: Do you believe in heaven?

OBAMA: Do I believe in the harps and clouds and wings?

GG: A place spiritually you go to after you die?

OBAMA: What I believe in is that if I live my life as well as I can, that I will be rewarded. I don’t presume to have knowledge of what happens after I die. But I feel very strongly that whether the reward is in the here and now or in the hereafter, the aligning myself to my faith and my values is a good thing.

When I tuck in my daughters at night and I feel like I’ve been a good father to them, and I see in them that I am transferring values that I got from my mother and that they’re kind people and that they’re honest people, and they’re curious people, that’s a little piece of heaven.

GG: Do you believe in sin?

OBAMA: Yes.

GG: What is sin?

OBAMA: Being out of alignment with my values.

GG: What happens if you have sin in your life?

OBAMA: I think it’s the same thing as the question about heaven. In the same way that if I’m true to myself and my faith that that is its own reward, when I’m not true to it, it’s its own punishment.

In the fall, Obama’s critics are going to go after him because they don’t believe he’s a “true Christian.” (read: abortion, civil unions, etc) I think the Obama religious outreach team is ready for that debate. They believe that Christianity speaks to more public policy positions than just abortion and gay marriage.

Source:

blogs.cbn.com/thebrodyfile/archive/2008/06/03/2004-interview-obama-talks-about-jesus-heaven-and-sin.aspx

If you google "Obama Jesus historical ", there are a number of Web sites that carry this transcript.

 

[Betterave]

To be clear: I’ve admitted that I misread what the heck you were talking about because of the problems you have in communicating your ideas in a written fashion. This isn’t the first time your writing has been misunderstood by me and by others, and I’m not the only person to complain about your inability to clearly express yourself.

You could always try to read more carefully and ask questions if there is something you don’t understand.

I noticed I was misreading you before I felt that I was wrong – how in the heck could I possibly feel that I was wrong before I noticed that I was wrong?

It is a quite ordinary experience to feel that one is wrong, in a general way, before going on to notice how one has been wrong. Feelings often motivate us to search out errors. This seems strange to you??

Or do you have special little idiosyncratic definitions of these words? I don’t want you to go defining a whole new language into existence when I’m not looking.

Now why would you say that?

You have such a problem with written communication that I can barely decipher your gibberings here.

One of us have a problem. You haven’t presented any evidence that it’s me.

My paraphrase of the above paragraph is as follows: “Before you realized that you were wrong, you thought you were right, and since there’s a feeling of confidence that goes with thinking that you’re right, you had a great deal of misplaced confidence in a false claim.”

If I have misinterpreted your point, please correct me.

Not bad. You just missed my emphasis on the always aspect of such feelings. Such feelings accompany all beliefs as such, whether they are based on careful examination of evidence or on careless, arrogant bigotry (or anything else you can or can’t think of).

Thus far, I’m in agreement that someone can mistakenly think that he’s right and be very confident about it. Let’s use the example of our proofreader again. He’s proofread his essay, and he’s confident that he’s right about there being no typos in the whole document.

So let’s see where you’re going with this:

“You claim to accept claims because you can rationally see that there is sufficient evidence to support the claim. But as our case study has just demonstrated, this claim is sometimes false.”

Let’s stop there. In my claim that I accept claims because I can rationally see that there is sufficient evidence to support the claim, there is the implicit -]idea/-] highly questionable assertion that I will always do so to the best of my ability based on the evidence available

Obviously, no one’s perfect, and people are sometimes operating from faulty evidence or making bad deductions. Countless scientific ideas have been overturned – those ideas were accepted on the basis of evidence that was available at the time, and they are overturned only when new evidence becomes available.

What does that mean, “becomes available”? Is that like “becomes evident”? So when new evidence becomes evident? So what constitutes “evidence” as such? “Being evident”?..

(You can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make him drink. You can try to shove a can of worms under the rug, but that lump under the rug is still ‘evident’ enough - at least to some of us.)

Similarly, our confident proofreader bases his claim (“There are no typos here!”) on the evidence of his hasty read-through. When presented with new evidence (like, for example, a slow read-through of his own essay or someone slowly reading it and then pointing out to him where the typos are), his claim will change.

My claim – that people accept claims because they rationally see that there is sufficient evidence to support the claim, to the best of their ability with the best evidence that is available at the time – is true, then.

No, your claim is false. People often accept a claim because they DO NOT see that there is NOT sufficient evidence to support the claim. For many possible reasons they may NOT exercise the “best of their ability” in assessing the best evidence that is available. If you meant to claim that “people CLAIM TO accept claims because they rationally see… [etc.],” that is obviously false too. In particular cases where it is true, that CLAIM is merely an assertion, obviously not antecedently supported by evidence, and it is likely false.

I am correctly describing the process that people use to evaluate claims. And I am also correct in my observation that evidence-based inquiry is the only consistently reliable – which, to be clear, does not mean “always correct” [do you mean the method, or the results of the method?] – method of discerning truth.

You haven’t described a process at all, never mind correctly. And your “observation” that “evidence-based” inquiry is consistently reliable is obviously false, as evidenced by your own “evidence-based” inquiry in this thread.

If you disagree, then present another method of discerning truth, and explain how you know that it is consistently reliable.

I don’t know why you’re assuming that I think there is a method of discerning truth that is consistently reliable, but for starters try to avoid fallacious arguments (especially ad hominem, straw man, and question-begging ones).

 

[AntiTheist]

One of us have a problem. You haven’t presented any evidence that it’s me.

One of us has a problem. Subject-verb agreement.

Now who is it that has a problem with writing?

Not bad.

It wasn’t only “not bad” – it was the entire idea you were trying to convey in far, far, far fewer words and far, far, far more clarity.

And your “observation” that “evidence-based” inquiry is consistently reliable is obviously false

…]

I don’t know why you’re assuming that I think there is a method of discerning truth that is consistently reliable

So is it your claim that we don’t have a method of discerning truth that is consistently reliable?

Recall what I said about the Matrix argument being nothing but the love of ignorance.

 

[Betterave]

Haven’t read every post yet, but wanted to mark this place.

It’s not just the Matrix.
…

Say what? Far out post man. So assuming this little interview is correct, it turns out that Obama really isn’t a Christian? …but we might be in the Matrix…so maybe that interview was just anti-Obama propaganda? (I actually have no idea how this post was supposed to relevant - sorry.)

 

[Betterave]

One of us has a problem. Subject-verb agreement.

What was that about evidence?

That you didn’t present any, smart guy! There was nothing remotely “indecipherable” about my little typo (or about the irrelevance of your jumping on it).

It wasn’t only “not bad” – it was the entire idea you were trying to convey in far, far, far fewer words and far, far, far more clarity.

No, not really. As I mentioned, you missed part of it that was crucial for the subsequent point I was making. And what evidence do you have to offer for your claim that your paraphrase had “far, far, far more clarity”? Uh, let’s see… none? again? Imagine that!

So is it your claim that we don’t have a method of discerning truth that is consistently reliable?

If you don’t have a consistently reliable way to arrive at truth, why in the heck should anyone listen to a thing you have to say?

Your question here appears to be based on the following non sequitur: If you don’t claim to have a consistently reliable way to arrive at truth, then no one should listen to a thing you say. Unfortunately the point you’re missing is that the unreliability of MY method of arriving at the truth (although the notion that we should avoid committing fallacies isn’t really MY idea) is precisely a result of people like yourself NOT listening to what I say (and again, what I say isn’t some weird idiosyncratic thing I made up - it is taught to most college freshmen in a course called something like “Critical Thinking”).

Recall what I said about the Matrix argument being nothing but the love of ignorance.

Yes, you like making groundless assertions - so what? I think we’ve established this fact ad nauseam already. Could we move on to something else?

 

[AntiTheist]

So is it your claim that we don’t have a method of discerning truth that is consistently reliable?

And furthermore, if we don’t have a method of discerning truth that is consistently reliable, how in the holly heck do you think people managed to construct computers and figure out how to send messages around the world at incredible speeds?

Do you really think that the people who construct computers are just guessing? Or do you think that they have a consistently reliable method of knowing that what they are doing will work?

 

[AntiTheist]

Do you think that there is a consistently reliable way to come to knowledge or not?

 

[Prodigal_Son]

GG: What is sin?
OBAMA: Being out of alignment with my values.

 

[tjkozinski]

Antitheist:

Any thoughts on my most recent post? I’d be interested to hear them. Thanks.

Thaddeus

 

[Betterave]

And furthermore, if we don’t have a method of discerning truth that is consistently reliable, how in the holly heck do you think people managed to construct computers and figure out how to send messages around the world at incredible speeds?

Implicit argument here:
If we can construct something like a computer, then we must know how to construct something like a computer. [That’s correct.]

If we know how to construct something like a computer, then we must have a (general) method of discerning truth that is consistently reliable. [That’s a *non sequitur.]

Do you really think that the people who construct computers are just guessing?

Do I really think that? What do you think? Do you really think I might think that?

Or do you think that they have a consistently reliable method of knowing that what they are doing will work?

Of course they have a consistently reliable method of knowing that what they are doing will work. But they obviously don’t have a consistently reliable method for discerning the truth.

Do you think that there is a consistently reliable way to come to knowledge or not?

I’ve already repeatedly told you an important part of what we need to do if we even hope to come to knowledge. Your question is difficult to answer, however, because it fails to distinguish between the ‘generation’ of knowledge and the ‘transmission’ of already-generated knowledge. Can you try to think about this distinction before posing your question again?

 

[Monte_RCMS]

Say what? Far out post man. So assuming this little interview is correct, it turns out that Obama really isn’t a Christian? …but we might be in the Matrix…so maybe that interview was just anti-Obama propaganda? (I actually have no idea how this post was supposed to relevant - sorry.)

The interview, in my opinion, encapsulated what the average college student [stoned or not] might come up with on his or her own after absorbing the “Matrix culture” as to who is Jesus, and what is sin. For example.

To someone without a thorough study and whose background might be limited to “Matrix-esque” exposure, Jesus might indeed be only a historical bridge to God … and not God Himself, God, the Son of God.

And sin … becomes not a violation of the Ten Commandments … but some ethereal dissonance with some community standards [of belief? of behavior? of what???]

So, on their own, stoned or unstoned college students might come up with their own definition of Christianity, which is dramatically at variance with Church teaching and even with Protestant teaching.

The Matrix is not helpful. And neither is Harry Potter.

Instead of spending hours with Matrix and HP, it would be better if perhaps some artful producer and director came up with a 100 minute summary of the real Christianity based on the a summary of the Bible, Revelation, and the Teaching Magisterium of the Church.

 

[Marc_Anthony]

The Matrix is not helpful. And neither is Harry Potter.

As a huge Harry Potter fan (only watched one Matrix movie, didn’t like it), I’ll just say it’s not suppposed to be helpful. It’s a 100% fictional book, described as such. It’s meant to entertain, and it is in fact strikingly Christian in its morality.

 

[AntiTheist]

Of course [people who construct computers] have a consistently reliable method of knowing that what they are doing will work. But they obviously don’t have a consistently reliable method for discerning the truth.

They have a consistently reliable method of knowing that it’s true that putting together X, Y, and Z parts in such and such a way will create a computer.

I have a consistently reliable method of knowing that when I turn on my faucet, it’s true that water is going to come out, and not lava.

I have a consistently reliable method of knowing that it’s not true that doing a rain dance will make water come out of my faucet.

What about juries and criminal justice? If we don’t have a consistently reliable way of knowing the truth, are you of the opinion that we should not have a criminal justice system and that we should not punish crime, since we don’t have a consistently reliable method of knowing the truth about these crimes?

 

[AntiTheist]

How do you know that what you experience is the fullness of reality? I don’t know that what I experience is the fullness of reality, or even reality at all, either, for I am very capable of misreading my experience of of distorting it willfully for irrational and evil purposes. But that’s why I trust in divine revelation and the help of grace (as well as rational deliberation and conversation and inquiry–aided by grace–)

If you can’t trust your own ability to read reality correctly, for what reason do you trust your ability to correctly interpret divine revelation or to assess that there, in fact, is such a divine revelation at all?

Your argument is self-refuting.

EDIT: Also, if you claim that you are “capable of misreading [your] experience of” reality, then you have to be able to know that you are misreading your experience of reality. If you know that you misread reality sometimes, this implies that you have a method of discerning what reality is and how it diverges from your misreading of it.

Your argument cannot sustain itself.

The world is greater than our personal experience of it, which tends to be shrunken and partial and distorted by our self-absorption and self-deceptions, and our psychological and spiritual traumas of our past.

I agree with this. An individual can make mistakes in perceiving reality – in fact, thanks to the way that our brains work due to evolution (we use sensory data to build up models of reality), it’s likely that we’re going to overlook things or misperceive things. We do it all the time.

This is, in fact, the entire reason we came up with evidence-based inquiry. No matter how much it may feel like everyone is out to get you, you can determine through evidence that there’s no indication that it’s true. No matter how much you may think that that page you just wrote has no typos, you can determine through evidence (usually having a friend give it a read-through), that there is indeed a typo there.

The more evidence we have, the more likely it is that our claims are true. And if you’re going to turn around and stammer, “But, but, how do we know that we’re interpreting the evidence correctly??!” the answer is that we don’t know that for certain – we don’t know anything for certain – and we don’t need to know it for certain.

Knowledge is always tenetative, always something that we know to be highly likely to be true, based on evidence (the more evidence we have, the more likely it is to be true). If we find out that we’ve been incorrectly interpreting evidence, then we’ll make changes accordingly, but until then, there’s no good reason to change our ideas.

See what I mean about the Matrix Argument being nothing but a love of ignorance? We’ve had one poster state that we don’t have a consistently reliable method of discerning truth (even though we lock up criminals and insane people all the time…on what basis, I wonder). Now we have another poster saying, basically, just because our senses can be wrong from time to time, we don’t have any good reason to trust them and should just randomly trust “divine revelation,” which we apparently also have no good reason to trust (and have no reason to trust our ability to discern whether or not it’s true). Just ridiculous.

 

[Betterave]

AntiTheist, a suggestion: perhaps you should try responding to the entire argument that is advanced against your position in a given post, instead of picking out one line and ignoring the rest. This would tend to accomplish three purposes:

1. it would force you to actually try to carefully read the complete argument being advanced against your position and perhaps this would help you to understand it better;
2. this would in turn (hopefully) reduce the amount of straw man nonsense in your posts because it would become more likely that you would actually be responding to the arguments advanced against your position;
3. this possible reduction in straw man nonsense might lead to a reduction in ad hominem nonsense, and then we would be free to focus on your non sequiturs.

[It occurs to me that maybe you don’t know what logical fallacies are, especially the ones I’ve mentioned, and why they are to be avoided - is that the case?]

 

[Betterave]

The interview, in my opinion, encapsulated what the average college student [stoned or not] might come up with on his or her own after absorbing the “Matrix culture” as to who is Jesus, and what is sin. For example.

…

Instead of spending hours with Matrix and HP, it would be better if perhaps some artful producer and director came up with a 100 minute summary of the real Christianity based on the a summary of the Bible, Revelation, and the Teaching Magisterium of the Church.

I can agree that Obama presents as something of a narcissistic airhead in the interview segment, but I don’t see the Matrix connection. I think the Matrix is much more suggestive of the possibility of our needing to transcend narcissistic airhead assumptions typical of decadent post-modern culture so as to find the truth.

 

[Betterave]

They have a consistently reliable method of knowing that it’s true that putting together X, Y, and Z parts in such and such a way will create a computer.

I have a consistently reliable method of knowing that when I turn on my faucet, it’s true that water is going to come out, and not lava.

I have a consistently reliable method of knowing that it’s not true that doing a rain dance will make water come out of my faucet.

Quick question: is there a difference between
A: “a consistently reliable method of knowing that it’s true that putting together X, Y, and Z parts in such and such a way will create a computer” (what is that method, by the way?)

and
B: “a consistently reliable method of knowing that putting together X, Y, and Z parts in such and such a way will create a computer”?

If yes, what is the difference; if no, to what end do you insert the phrase “it’s true that”?

What about juries and criminal justice? If we don’t have a consistently reliable way of knowing the truth, are you of the opinion that we should not have a criminal justice system and that we should not punish crime, since we don’t have a consistently reliable method of knowing the truth about these crimes?

I’m a bit confused: Are you suggesting that I said that “we don’t have a consistently reliable method of knowing the truth about these crimes”?

(It’s not clear which ones you’re referring to - “these” ones… You just mean crimes in general? And what truth about them? That’s not at all clear either.)