Re: dhw--Epistemological Framework (Order of Rank?) (Humans)

by xeno6696 , Sonoran Desert, Saturday, March 05, 2011, 19:36 (5011 days ago) @ dhw

dhw,
> In my still so sadly neglected twenty-four-one, I tried to set out the various factors underlying the subjectivity of belief, and in the discussion generally, I've tried to differentiate between fields....-We will return to this post... after we understand what it is I'm trying to do.-> My apologies if I'm not getting to what you consider to be the "the very root", but you will gather from the above that I'm still not sure what it is.-The root of the problem, is that each of us places more weight on some kinds of knowledge than others. You mentioned previously that you shift your weights depending on the scenario--but the question that I would ask here, is "Why is this reasonable? Why do you do it?" -I've said previously that one of my primary reasons for leaning materialist is that there is only two means to inform ourselves about the world. The first is through direct experience. The other is through empirical means. Empirical means would more or less be the 5 senses, and the mind would be direct experience. -Realistically, direct experience includes mental formations, such as seeing connections that you were unaware of before. This is also coincidentally why I say that a person only truly knows something when it has permeated BOTH means of learning about the world. One could say that the divide between theists and atheists is precisely that each rejects the other's means of exploring the world. -That said, for us here on the "middle path," I think our goal should be to get more at the more abstract root--why we rank some property higher than others. -To date, we typically fall into a pattern where say, David submits an article with a judgment. We then discuss the article, but we never get to the REAL point of disagreement. I attempt to get to the real disagreement quite often, but the trappings of the situation fog and distract.-David follows Adlerian/Thomist reasoning. Why is this reasonable, when for the most part, Thomist thinking has lain abandoned for nearly 200 years? -Going back a post, again, why do we decide to reject some arguments and not others? Why does Behe feel that unworkable calculations are sufficient to infer a creator God? -Why does some of us feel that it needs to rush to solutions when we've only been aware of the deeper nature of these questions for about 70-80 years?-I know you might interpret this as "why isn't everyone agnostic," but we can turn different questions on ourselves: Are we not choosing for egoistic reasons? We know that we can't "know" if God exists, but why is it unreasonable to infer a God, knowing that even for the snapshots of life we've seen, we know that the odds are impossible for things to have come about by random combinations? Why can't reason alone be enough? (Other than it's unfashionable?)

--
\"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.\"