Ontological Arguments (Humans)

by xeno6696 , Sonoran Desert, Saturday, September 25, 2010, 21:30 (5172 days ago) @ Balance_Maintained

Balance, thanks for taking a whack!
> > 1. Demonstrate something in my life that I regularly use that is an ontological-type argument... its possible that I have something like this in use somewhere in my framework. 
> > 
> > 2. Demonstrate why you think these kinds of arguments are valid; why should we accept them. Or more directly, "Why should I alter my epistemology in order to accommodate them?"
> > 
> > Or any other criterion that you think might persuade me. I'm trying to find a chink in the armor of materialism here... why is materialism wrong?
> 
> The easy one to pick right off the bat is the materialist cosmology models. i.e. No matter how far you go back, or which model you use, something had to come from nothing. Even with the latest 'quantum fluctuations triggered the Big Bang' line, what caused the quantum fluctuations? Eventually with that type of reasoning you will eventually get to a point where something came from nothing. And while in a way that doesn't fit the definition of Ontological, in a way it does. Perfect nothingness capable of creating something from itself(i.e. nothing) is no less a form of deism. But that is only my opinion.
> -I will start out that I'm a materialist by operational restriction; I don't assert that matter is all that exists, but I know that the only things that are studyable (as opposed to speculative) are material things. The only possible exception would be studying our inner minds, which is handled by consciousness (which you get to in a moment...)-As was pointed out here recently, the concept of a timeless universe with no discrete beginning isn't a dead idea, and really staves the problem you're poking at here; In Buddhism since the only thing that exists is "right now" and we all live in one universe, than any and all ideas of beginning and end are null and void. They are illusions we create to help us get by in the world. -But even if we assert the universe had a finite beginning, we still have no knowledge of it. We have models; but these are at best mere abstractions to what was really going on. -> The paragraph above also explains why they are valid. Something must exist in order for everything to exist. If something comes from 'nothing', then it wasn't 'nothing', it was something.
> -This is only if we assert that the universe had a prime cause. It's a deeper question; if every effect had a cause, and every cause necessitates an effect, than what caused the prime cause? It's a logical conundrum. I think that existence is purely a tautology, which is why we can't make heads or tails of it; there's nothing to make heads or tails of if a statement is simply true and that's that. -> Belief in the manifest material universe around you is not 'wrong' per se. But to me, it is kind of like how we put blinders on horses so as not to scare them with the other stuff that is out there beyond their field of vision. Materialism, as an ideal, ignores what it can't comprehend. (No slight to you intended) For example, consciousness. This is something everyone is intimately aware of, yet it is not physical. It is greater than the sum of its parts. It can not be weighed, weighed, measured, or quantified. It simply is. Something either is conscious, or is not. And while there are degrees of consciousness, there are no intermediates between conscious, and not conscious.-No slight taken here. I told you when you came in that for operational reasons I tended to stay away from many such topics; because if I can't study it, isn't the attempt fruitless? I can study my consciousness, but have no access to yours, even though language. -In my case, I'm much more comfortable simply saying "I don't know, and I haven't the foggiest" when it comes to things such as consciousness. In some respects "self-evident truths" alleviates some of this.-But it still doesn't answer the question of why ontological arguments are valid. You seem to assert that they are valid, but from my view they make claims that can't be supported--and in some cases, barely justified. They are tautologies. "... as Bertrand Russell observed, it is much easier to be persuaded that ontological arguments are no good than it is to say exactly what is wrong with them." This is also the case with tautologies.

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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.\"