The real discussion: Values (Humans)

by xeno6696 , Sonoran Desert, Monday, December 14, 2015, 16:11 (3049 days ago)

I think the discussion we really *ought* to be having is more of a meta-discussion. I hate to seem to hijack the thread but...-David clearly values faith higher than myself or dhw. Otherwise, he wouldn't be willing to leap away from science into the purely philosophical realm of an intelligent designer. (Yes he uses science to justify his opinions, but using science to justify yourself doesn't mean your opinion is scientific.) -Myself, faith is something that probably doesn't break my top 100 list for traits worth having. I can't talk to why David or dhw place faith where they do, but for me its because of this:-Life has demonstrated to me, that not only are human beings pretty bad at making judgments about probabilities, we're generally pretty bad at making judgments overall. Part of that is evolutionary short-sigtedness: evolution has determined that I should really like sweet things. But it is rarely in my best interest to indulge. The other part is that we're programmed for intuitional leaps... snap judgments that exist because in the past, making them made it more likely to live through an encounter. -My highest value is placed upon epistemology: How we know what we know. Skepticism tells us that the less concrete some fact is, the less value we should place on it. This basic heuristic has seen us move from dawdlers, to penultimate masters of the biosphere, in less than 1000 years. A blink of an eye in geological terms. -So part of the discussion to me seems, that with values about faith, we should discuss our values about skepticism. (Scepticism for my good British friend!) -I say all this because, part of the reason I tapered off on this forum wasn't from lack of interest, but from lack of movement from the practitioners. (Myself included.) The things that motivate us to make particular arguments are values and judgments, and thanks to my friends the Stoics, I've learned that it is *these* that need to be changed, if our desire is to change hearts and minds. Otherwise we're just talking past each other in beautifully posed prose and sophistry. To what end? Isn't the point of philosophical inquiry to arrive at the truth of things? Or is there no truth here to be gained, as was the judgment of a former member, Mr. Jeliss?-So perhaps if we laid bare our "first principles," in regards to why we hold particular values that lie at the ROOT of our debates, we could expose those things that if exposed to light, could extinguish darkness and actually cause us to change our minds?

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\"Why is it, Master, that ascetics fight with ascetics?\"

\"It is, brahmin, because of attachment to views, adherence to views, fixation on views, addiction to views, obsession with views, holding firmly to views that ascetics fight with ascetics.\"