FAITH... WITH REASON

FAITH... WITH REASON Mar 5, 2017 19:24:47 GMT

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Post by Eva Yojimbo on Mar 5, 2017 19:24:47 GMT

Mar 5, 2017 19:07:57 GMT fatpaul said:

Mar 5, 2017 18:06:38 GMT Eva Yojimbo said:

my point to you, cham, and the OP, is that there comes a point in any reasoning, whether scientific or theological, where we may have to take certain principles and axioms on faith, that is mostly, appeal to the authority that proposed such principles and axioms. You offered one of the most fundamental logical principles, OR, for justification that the laws are invariant to which I replied that a bias in us doesn't necessarily mean that it is a bias towards reality. You stated, and still do, that SI gives us every confidence in OR being a true real principle. This I do not deny, in fact like everyone else, I tend to simplicity and would like to think this tendency is truth-driven and justified but, as shown in my link to simplicity, it not quite a done deal in the realms of scientific realism.

Scientific realism, or reality itself, may be judged in three areas, metaphysics, semantics, and epistemology. Empiricism cannot explain the metaphysical, being of the physical, and questions are always asked of our semantical interpretation, so one has to ask what this means epistemically. My bolded part implies to me that you think otherwise, in that empiricism is reality; empiricism is for efficiency and rationalism is for reason which both may, or may not, explain reality. It may seem pedantic of me, but even using any method or logical principle that itself tends to simplicity to justify this tendency for simplicity, needs to be questioned if the end game is to know the nature of reality.

One of the fundamental principles of logic is that the propositions must be assumed and can't be proven within the framework of the formulated argument. One of the fundamental problems of philosophy is how to determine what premises to assume to begin with. However, I'd argue that we do not have to take principles on faith. Rather, I think there's a recursive relationship between rationality and empiricism. In particular, we can make assumptions, test their consequences, and if they match the empirical results then that's evidence that the assumptions are true. If you take math as an example, the peano axioms are assumed but not proven; we continue to assume them because they seem to accurately model reality (ie, they match our empirical experiences). I would say that Occam is much the same way, and we assume it on the same principles by which we assume mathematical axioms.

I do realize there are some realist problems with the notion of simplicity. Even within the realm of computational complexity much depends on what language we choose. Using binary is one way to try to get around this, since binary is universal and the simplest language possible (you can't create a language simpler than one that relies on true/false). That may ultimately prove impractical, but I'm just speaking in principle here. For some things, however, we needn't bother with these gray areas of simplicity/complexity: I keep using it as an example, but the conjunction fallacy applies no matter what language we choose or how we define complexity/simplicity, and the variant/variant distinction is a pretty straight-forward example of it.

RE your second paragraph: In philosophy, metaphysics doesn't mean "beyond the physical," but just refers to whatever is--all the notions surrounding being. If there is something beyond the physical, this would fall under metaphysics; but the existence of atoms fall under the category of metaphysics as well. Most rationalists don't bother with metaphysics since we recognize that ultimately what we're concerned with is making it so our models--perceptions of how reality functions--matches our phenomenal experience of reality. If they do, we don't see much point in questioning it beyond that point since it just turns into intellectual masturbation with no experiential consequences. So when I say that Occam is an "ontological principle" I'm saying that in the sense that I (and other) conflate our empirical experience of reality with reality itself, so that it's a principle of our map-making abilities. The same way you might say when looking at a tree that "the tree exists" without going through the rigmarole of saying "I'm experiencing my visual cortex's interpretation and reconstruction of photons that are bouncing off an object that may or may not exist beyond by perception in the form that I call a tree."

Here's a good read on the subjective of recursive justification: lesswrong.com/lw/s0/where_recursive_justification_hits_bottom/