This is a philosophy 101 test!

[mfbukowski]

On 6/18/2021 at 5:33 PM, The Nehor said:

Reminds me of this old C.S. Lewis quote:

“In both countries an essential part of the ordination exam ought to be a passage from some recognized theological work set for translation into vulgar English–just like doing Latin prose. Failure on this paper should mean failure on the whole exam. It is absolutely disgraceful that we expect missionaries to the Bantus to learn Bantu but never ask whether our missionaries to the Americans or English can speak American or English. Any fool can write learned language. The vernacular is the real test. If you can’t turn your faith into it, then either you don’t understand it or you don’t believe it.”

Yes, you know that is the way that most philosophy tests worked when I was in school, of course especially in the graduate level classes.

It's a little hard to do multiple guess tests.  

"Of the below 6 definitions of existence, which is the best?"   

And yes trying to put these questions into the cultural vernacular is absolutely the hardest especially when you are trying to put across ideas which are NOT in the "cultural vernacular" because you are trying to illustrateto people what is wrong with the only way they know of thinking about things. 

So you have to use the cultural vernacular to express things that that vernacular is not capable, by definition, of expressing.

 

[mfbukowski]

On 6/19/2021 at 6:25 AM, CV75 said:

OK but before you do that I had a dream last night that I was bringing officers Malloy and Reed to an old abandoned school I attended long ago that very few knew had a broken door for illicit touring. They were no longer policemen and were quite enthusiastic; I had taken my children there 30 years ago and they wanted to do the same. i asked them what they had been doing since the show ended, and Malloy disappeared (the actor had since died); Reed said he went back into the Navy and was perfectly happy with that decision. I share this because it led to a revision of my list of bullets (red):

• Existence is out there as an objective process
• We do not need to exist or experience it for it to be there.
• Even “things” are processes in that they came from somewhere and are going somewhere.
• "Out there" meaning beyond our immediate experience, which we can call "in here" (our minds).
• We are a subset of existence, and so we interface "in here" with "out there".
• We can call existence “truth.”
• We can observe, measure and assess things physically and/or spiritually and consider them part of existence.
• We can call this "experience."
• We each experience only a tiny subset of the broader or full existence.
• Our experience is a wholly subjective process; no one else has it.
• We sort out what matters: what works (aka "true"), what doesn't work (aka "false"), and what is indeterminate, what doesn't matter, etc.
• We create descriptions of our experience solely to serve our (subjective) purposes. Otherwise we don't create descriptions in the first place, or remember them.
• Sometimes we destroy our descriptions solely to serve our (subjective) purposes. But we might still remember them.
• We can share our descriptions with others, and conclude that we experience this same part of existence and describe it in the same way.
• This is human nature and we survive, thrive and do better when we do this.

Howdy mi amigo!    Like your dream!!

I think I will just work on this version of your post, since it contains a revision of your original post- if I am missing something tell me.

I think maybe all my attempts at explaining the Rorty quote has confused more people than helped them, and I am glad you posted this because it is an opportunity for me to get at least a chance on getting it more clear and testing a new strategy

Let's try this.  Suppose the aliens have finally landed and you are assigned to learn about how they think about philosophy.

There is just one problem.   In their culture they have no need for certain words or ideas which have evolved- erroneously- in our culture. People have made up words that cannot be defined, so they are useless!

You know there are some people who believe that whales and dolphins have not evolved - as far as we know- abstract language- because they are so perfectly developed and in harmony with their enviroment.  They swim, they eat, they make babies, they defend themselves but they do not have to build houses, make clothes etc.  We do not understand their "songs" yet, but who knows what they are about above saying "Here I am!"

But these aliens are humanoids just like us- it's just that to them, these concepts don't exist.   They have no need for them

They are so intelligent that they have no use for the following words or ideas:  in here, out there, existence, objective, subjective, truth, reality, appearance  and some others we may add to the list.

Now we have entered your dreamland with a different dream!

Let's dream of a world without those words!

For these creatures all there is is "EXPERIENCE" !  Now imagine that this world is exactly the world you "experience" every day of your life!  You walk around, go to work, talk to your family but you never use those words because they have not been invented!   All there is is experience- this kind of stream of consciousness including your daily activities and your dreams and thoughts etc.  People can and do write down their experiences, some of them are poetry, stories, literature

Life is an affair of the interaction between a living being and its physical and social environment.   I will repeat that because it is extrememly important. 

Howdy mi amigo!    Like your dream!!

I think I will just work on this version of your post, since it contains a revision of your original post- if I am missing something tell me.

I think maybe all my attempts at explaining the Rorty quote has confused more people than helped them, and I am glad you posted this because it is an opportunity for me to get at least a chance on getting it more clear and testing a new strategy

Let's try this.  Suppose the aliens have finally landed and you are assigned to learn about how they think about philosophy.

There is just one problem.   In their culture they have no need for certain words or ideas which have evolved- erroneously- in our culture.

You know there are some people who believe that whales and dolphins have not evolved - as far as we know- abstract language- because they are so perfectly developed and in harmony with their enviroment.  They swim, they eat, they make babies, they defend themselves but they do not have to build houses, make clothes etc.  We do not understand their "songs" yet, but who knows what they are about above saying "Here I am!"

But these folks are humanoids just like us- it's just that to them, these concepts don't exist

They are so intelligent that they have no use for the following words or ideas:  in here, out there, existence, objective, subjective, truth, reality, appearance  and some others we may add to the list.

Now we have entered your dreamland with a different dream!

Let's dream of a world without those words!

For these creatures all there is is "EXPERIENCE" !  Now imagine that this world is exactly the world you "experience" every day of your life!  You walk around, go to work, talk to your family but you never use those words because they have not been invented!   All there is is experience- this kind of stream of consciousness including your daily activities and your dreams and thoughts etc.  There IS nothing beyond your direct experience, and the experience of others

Life is an affair of we beings in interaction between us and our a physical and social environment. And again:

Life is an affair of the interaction between a living being and its physical and social environment.   

We see hear feel etc. and we react to those sense EXPERIENCES.  Then we may take action using our agency to alter that environment.  We may do that mechanically- chopping wood and building a house.  Or we might do it intellectually.  We might need to calculate something in building the house.  We might write philosophy or express our religous beliefs.  None of those things disappear!

There is no distinction between what is "out there" and what is "in here"- that is "in the outside world" vs what is "in our heads" that presents us any useful information, it just IS as we perceive it.

Do we make errors in perception?  Of course!  Are there still optical illusions and mirages and just errors in how we see things?  Of course!  But so what?   We perceive the mirage as water and then when we get a better look, oops- no water.

The hypothesis that what we saw was water.  It was tested and found that it did not work.  There is no need for calling it "false"- what good is that word?   It just did not work as expected.  It was not "pragmatic" to foster that belief, so now in our interation with the environment we need a new hypothesis.

How would we verify our personal observations?   We ask others in the community!  "Hey-did you try THIS?  Did it work?"

The scientist tries an experiment.  If it is not replicated, it is a dead end.  His experience is not verified as useful.

Do we believe in God?   We follow Alma 32 and Moroni 10:5.  What are our experiences?   Are they inside or outside?  Irrelevant!  The text said to do xyz and it either worked or it didn't- no need to make up reasons.  In principle it is like the scientist testing his hypothesis.

But what if different people get different results?

And scientists get different results as well, but the more results which cohere the more "certain" we become that the formula "works" or does not.  Whether the results are spiritual or physical is irrelevant.

OK Now let's get back to your questions

Quote

Existence is out there as an objective process

Ok but unecessary to believe

Quote

We do not need to exist or experience it for it to be there.

Nobody knows that and there is no reason to worry about it.  Life goes on.

Quote

Even “things” are processes in that they came from somewhere and are going somewhere.

Things and life itself is a process- hence the name "process philosphy".  Your perception of things can be a process like the mirage example.  Good observation!

Quote

"Out there" meaning beyond our immediate experience, which we can call "in here" (our minds).

No evidence for that and no reason to believe it.  All there is is experience

Quote

We are a subset of existence, and so we interface "in here" with "out there".

What good does that statement do for us?

Quote

We can call existence “truth.”

You can call anything anything you like I suspect- whether or not it makes a difference in our environment is what matters

Quote

We can observe, measure and assess things physically and/or spiritually and consider them part of existence. We can call this "experience."

Drop out the word "existence" OR make "existence" synonymous with "experience" - incidentally a great strategy- and yes and that is a brilliant insight

Experience IS all we count as "existing".   Can you show me anything that "exists" that we cannot experience?   Nope!  We can experience the presence of God.

Quote

We each experience only a tiny subset of the broader or full existence.

Certainly each of us only experiences a tiny part of all there IS to be experienced.  

Quote

Our experience is a wholly subjective process; no one else has it.

We can't know that either way- but because of our different backgrounds, knowledge etc, I think it is likely that we are all unique in what we have and will experience.  So yes, I don't like the idea of "subjective" but yes I think our experiences are uniquely precisely as our lives are unique.

Quote

We sort out what matters: what works (aka "true"), what doesn't work (aka "false"), and what is indeterminate, what doesn't matter, etc.

Nailed it.  Totally.  So if you really believe this, you get 100%. 

Quote

We create descriptions of our experience solely to serve our (subjective) purposes. Otherwise we don't create descriptions in the first place, or remember them.

 

We create descriptions of our experience to communicate them to alter our environemnt for some pragmatic purpose and find if others also have the "same" experience - Ie think that our description matches their description in their opinion.   Pretty soon you have a recipe book for how to bake a cake or build a scientific device or experiment to take our paradigms further toward tools to alter our environment to make it suit us.

Quote

 

We can share our descriptions with others, and conclude that we experience this same part of existence and describe it in the same way.

 

Make that "conclude that our experiences are the same, and describe it the same way" and it's perfect.   We both boil water at 212 degress and conclude we have had the "same experience"

Quote

This is human nature and we survive, thrive and do better when we do this.

I assume you are referring to the above line and this also nails it!

[CV75]

6 hours ago, mfbukowski said:

Howdy mi amigo!    Like your dream!!

I think I will just work on this version of your post, since it contains a revision of your original post- if I am missing something tell me.

I think maybe all my attempts at explaining the Rorty quote has confused more people than helped them, and I am glad you posted this because it is an opportunity for me to get at least a chance on getting it more clear and testing a new strategy

Let's try this.  Suppose the aliens have finally landed and you are assigned to learn about how they think about philosophy.

There is just one problem.   In their culture they have no need for certain words or ideas which have evolved- erroneously- in our culture. People have made up words that cannot be defined, so they are useless!

You know there are some people who believe that whales and dolphins have not evolved - as far as we know- abstract language- because they are so perfectly developed and in harmony with their enviroment.  They swim, they eat, they make babies, they defend themselves but they do not have to build houses, make clothes etc.  We do not understand their "songs" yet, but who knows what they are about above saying "Here I am!"

But these aliens are humanoids just like us- it's just that to them, these concepts don't exist.   They have no need for them

They are so intelligent that they have no use for the following words or ideas:  in here, out there, existence, objective, subjective, truth, reality, appearance  and some others we may add to the list.

Now we have entered your dreamland with a different dream!

Let's dream of a world without those words!

For these creatures all there is is "EXPERIENCE" !  Now imagine that this world is exactly the world you "experience" every day of your life!  You walk around, go to work, talk to your family but you never use those words because they have not been invented!   All there is is experience- this kind of stream of consciousness including your daily activities and your dreams and thoughts etc.  People can and do write down their experiences, some of them are poetry, stories, literature

Life is an affair of the interaction between a living being and its physical and social environment.   I will repeat that because it is extrememly important. 

Howdy mi amigo!    Like your dream!!

I think I will just work on this version of your post, since it contains a revision of your original post- if I am missing something tell me.

I think maybe all my attempts at explaining the Rorty quote has confused more people than helped them, and I am glad you posted this because it is an opportunity for me to get at least a chance on getting it more clear and testing a new strategy

Let's try this.  Suppose the aliens have finally landed and you are assigned to learn about how they think about philosophy.

There is just one problem.   In their culture they have no need for certain words or ideas which have evolved- erroneously- in our culture.

You know there are some people who believe that whales and dolphins have not evolved - as far as we know- abstract language- because they are so perfectly developed and in harmony with their enviroment.  They swim, they eat, they make babies, they defend themselves but they do not have to build houses, make clothes etc.  We do not understand their "songs" yet, but who knows what they are about above saying "Here I am!"

But these folks are humanoids just like us- it's just that to them, these concepts don't exist

They are so intelligent that they have no use for the following words or ideas:  in here, out there, existence, objective, subjective, truth, reality, appearance  and some others we may add to the list.

Now we have entered your dreamland with a different dream!

Let's dream of a world without those words!

For these creatures all there is is "EXPERIENCE" !  Now imagine that this world is exactly the world you "experience" every day of your life!  You walk around, go to work, talk to your family but you never use those words because they have not been invented!   All there is is experience- this kind of stream of consciousness including your daily activities and your dreams and thoughts etc.  There IS nothing beyond your direct experience, and the experience of others

Life is an affair of we beings in interaction between us and our a physical and social environment. And again:

Life is an affair of the interaction between a living being and its physical and social environment.   

We see hear feel etc. and we react to those sense EXPERIENCES.  Then we may take action using our agency to alter that environment.  We may do that mechanically- chopping wood and building a house.  Or we might do it intellectually.  We might need to calculate something in building the house.  We might write philosophy or express our religous beliefs.  None of those things disappear!

There is no distinction between what is "out there" and what is "in here"- that is "in the outside world" vs what is "in our heads" that presents us any useful information, it just IS as we perceive it.

Do we make errors in perception?  Of course!  Are there still optical illusions and mirages and just errors in how we see things?  Of course!  But so what?   We perceive the mirage as water and then when we get a better look, oops- no water.

The hypothesis that what we saw was water.  It was tested and found that it did not work.  There is no need for calling it "false"- what good is that word?   It just did not work as expected.  It was not "pragmatic" to foster that belief, so now in our interation with the environment we need a new hypothesis.

How would we verify our personal observations?   We ask others in the community!  "Hey-did you try THIS?  Did it work?"

The scientist tries an experiment.  If it is not replicated, it is a dead end.  His experience is not verified as useful.

Do we believe in God?   We follow Alma 32 and Moroni 10:5.  What are our experiences?   Are they inside or outside?  Irrelevant!  The text said to do xyz and it either worked or it didn't- no need to make up reasons.  In principle it is like the scientist testing his hypothesis.

But what if different people get different results?

And scientists get different results as well, but the more results which cohere the more "certain" we become that the formula "works" or does not.  Whether the results are spiritual or physical is irrelevant.

OK Now let's get back to your questions

Ok but unecessary to believe

Nobody knows that and there is no reason to worry about it.  Life goes on.

Things and life itself is a process- hence the name "process philosphy".  Your perception of things can be a process like the mirage example.  Good observation!

No evidence for that and no reason to believe it.  All there is is experience

What good does that statement do for us?

You can call anything anything you like I suspect- whether or not it makes a difference in our environment is what matters

Drop out the word "existence" OR make "existence" synonymous with "experience" - incidentally a great strategy- and yes and that is a brilliant insight

Experience IS all we count as "existing".   Can you show me anything that "exists" that we cannot experience?   Nope!  We can experience the presence of God.

Certainly each of us only experiences a tiny part of all there IS to be experienced.  

We can't know that either way- but because of our different backgrounds, knowledge etc, I think it is likely that we are all unique in what we have and will experience.  So yes, I don't like the idea of "subjective" but yes I think our experiences are uniquely precisely as our lives are unique.

Nailed it.  Totally.  So if you really believe this, you get 100%. 

We create descriptions of our experience to communicate them to alter our environemnt for some pragmatic purpose and find if others also have the "same" experience - Ie think that our description matches their description in their opinion.   Pretty soon you have a recipe book for how to bake a cake or build a scientific device or experiment to take our paradigms further toward tools to alter our environment to make it suit us.

Make that "conclude that our experiences are the same, and describe it the same way" and it's perfect.   We both boil water at 212 degress and conclude we have had the "same experience"

I assume you are referring to the above line and this also nails it!

As I think about it, my dream may well be connected to my edits as an expression of any or all of the “layers of ambiguous interpretation of sense data”.

I think that “101” requires an introduction using familiar language, and then as new concepts form, explain why the old language isn’t really necessary. For example, in your siggy, Rorty uses many unnecessary terms (world, out there, exists, truth, true, false, sentences/language, mental state, etc.) to build that bridge of understanding. The following are easy enough to digest, but at face value do not displace former notions (especially the first bullet).

• The process of experience is all we have.
• Each of us has unique experiences.
• Some experiences are beyond our control and others we intentionally create because they satisfy ("work for" / "matter to") us.
• We can share descriptions of our experience with others.

Or perhaps demonstrate that we have and always will experience life just as we did as infants, only we’ve processed more sensations and data since then and developed the ability to create intentional experience and share descriptions of our experience. Or maybe mention that the aliens are so advanced they can convincingly convey data and “what works” without verbal language, like Jesus did (Luke 24:32, 3 Nephi 17:17-18; 19:25) -- or the Alma 32 example!

Edited June 21, 2021 by CV75

[SeekingUnderstanding]

Hi Mr Bukowski, 

As someone who struggles to follow any deep philosophical post beyond the basics, is there an accessible introductory book out there that covers the basics? The closest I've gotten is "The Big Picture" by Sean Carroll and that was written by a physicist. I gotta believe there is better out there...

I listened to the great courses "The Modern Intellectual Tradition: From Descartes to Derrida" but no great understanding followed. I've tried listening to some of your posts of Rorty, but it still feels pretty inaccessible to me. Like I don't speak the right language.

Thanks,

John

[mfbukowski]

22 minutes ago, SeekingUnderstanding said:

Hi Mr Bukowski, 

As someone who struggles to follow any deep philosophical post beyond the basics, is there an accessible introductory book out there that covers the basics? The closest I've gotten is "The Big Picture" by Sean Carroll and that was written by a physicist. I gotta believe there is better out there...

I listened to the great courses "The Modern Intellectual Tradition: From Descartes to Derrida" but no great understanding followed. I've tried listening to some of your posts of Rorty, but it still feels pretty inaccessible to me. Like I don't speak the right language.

Thanks,

John

Well thanks for that- you are part of a potential audience for this project so if you are willing to help out by giving me comments then that would help.

I want to make this also a reply to @CV75 as well.

I was thinking about how I learned this stuff growing up and experiences I have had that helped me understand the philosophy as I got older so maybe in a way I was "born" to it and that is why I don't SEE why others don't SEE it as I do!

I was born with a lazy eye- my left eye and right eye have never quite presented my brain the same image, and until I went to school with eye tests etc, I did not know that was not "normal".  After that, it became pretty much corrected through exercises and eyepatches etc- but now I am getting older it has returned with a vengence!  

So as a kid my brain got different images from each of my eyes- of course it was just that the angle of vision between the two did not co-ordinate well.

Then once I overheard a conversation between my dad and his grandmother- born in the 1860's in Poland-  this was in the mid 1950's- about atomic theory.  He told her that the chair she was sitting in was not "really" an assemblage of solid pieces of wood, but a bunch of tiny tiny "balls" moving around and that there was more space between them than substance.   She looked at him, her wonderful engineer great grandson who made airplanes in America, and flipped out.  She wanted to call a doctor because something was wrong with his head, or he had been poisoned!!  

So I thought of that, and thought about my eye, and how that they each had different perspectives on what was "real"

Then in 8th grade in Catholic school, a group of us wanted to put on a "Passon Play" for the parish ("Ward" in Mormonese)  But how could we do that?  One of the members of our youth group's dad was in the movie business and a fairly well known actor and he had some ideas.  Why not get a large sheet of material and hang it like a curtain- but very tight one- on the front of the stage of the church hall- and from the back of the cloth, project shadows of the events of the crucifixion onto the screen, in shadow form?  From the front of the screen you wouldn't see the kids "as they were" from one perspective- wearing bathrobes pretending to be people from Jerusalem 2000 years ago- but from the front of the screen you would only see the shadows of the events in Christ's life.   We had a tape recorder and recorded some music from religous movies- and then got a kid who's voice changed early- to read the script at the right times while the "actors" in bathrobes acted it out in front of the light bulb, and invited the parish to come to our show!

The reaction was overwhelming!  There wasn't a dry eye in the house!  The "reality" was a bunch of kids in bathrobes but the "experience" projected out to the world and interpreted by the audience was absolutely stunning

So which side of the screen represented "reality" better?   Neither really- yet the experiences between the kids and the audience were vastly different.

Where is "TRVTH" etched in stone on the top of some Greek temple in these "realities".  There is no need for the word used in that context.

And even in the stories above, I gave my perspectives, not all possible perspectives of what was happening to each individual who had their individual experiences- the kid who did the music- etc

And later in my church life, I thought of the veil in the temple.

There was no need for the word "reality" in describing those experiences, the experiences just WERE!

So Rorty is trying to explain that in philosophese, and uses all the terms I would outlaw because he is describing both sides of experience at once.

 

Quote

 

" To say that the world is out there, that it is not our creation, is to say, with common sense, that most things in space and time are the effects of causes which do not include human mental states.  To say that truth is not out there is simply to say that where there are no sentences, there is no truth, that sentences are elements of human languages, and that human languages are human creations.

     Truth cannot be out there- cannot exist independently of the human mind- because sentences cannot so exist, or be out there.  The world is out there, but descriptions of the world are not.  Only descriptions of the world can be true or false.  The world on its own- unaided by the describing activities of human beings- cannot."   Richard Rorty- Contingency Irony and Solidarity, P 5.

 

We know that there is "something" causing these experiences- is it what we call the atoms in the chair or the wood we experience? Neither and both.  We haven't talked about quarks, or whatever else could "cause" the experience, the particles or waves or neurological effects etc etc etc- where IS the "TRVTH"?  It is a useless concept in this situation.

So common sense tells us there is some kind of cause of the perception but we can only see it AS we see it.  But we can make up sentences- as I am now- which might be true or false.   Did I get the description of the light waves right?   Was I lying about the other stories?   All those could be true or false- but the "reality" is not true or false.  There is nothing to pin down in the "reality" because there are so many perspectives possible in "seeing" the "reality"

Where there are no sentences, there is no "truth" because we cannot get outside our perceptions and really even express what is "really" going on.

Sentences are always trapped in the human world of experience.   They describe human experience and cannot do anything else.

The causes of experience cannot be described because all we can know is the experience.

Did this help anything?

[mfbukowski]

3 hours ago, CV75 said:

As I think about it, my dream may well be connected to my edits as an expression of any or all of the “layers of ambiguous interpretation of sense data”.

I think that “101” requires an introduction using familiar language, and then as new concepts form, explain why the old language isn’t really necessary. For example, in your siggy, Rorty uses many unnecessary terms (world, out there, exists, truth, true, false, sentences/language, mental state, etc.) to build that bridge of understanding. The following are easy enough to digest, but at face value do not displace former notions (especially the first bullet).

• The process of experience is all we have.
• Each of us has unique experiences.
• Some experiences are beyond our control and others we intentionally create because they satisfy ("work for" / "matter to") us.
• We can share descriptions of our experience with others.

Or perhaps demonstrate that we have and always will experience life just as we did as infants, only we’ve processed more sensations and data since then and developed the ability to create intentional experience and share descriptions of our experience. Or maybe mention that the aliens are so advanced they can convincingly convey data and “what works” without verbal language, like Jesus did (Luke 24:32, 3 Nephi 17:17-18; 19:25) -- or the Alma 32 example!

See above response to "Seeking.."

 

I hope it is realized that all this is about believing that religious experience is as justified rationally as any other experience.   

Edited June 21, 2021 by mfbukowski

[CV75]

31 minutes ago, mfbukowski said:

See above response to "Seeking.."

 

I hope it is realized that all this is about believing that religious experience is as justified rationally as any other experience.   

Yes, I understand your eventual aim is to rationally justify religious experience through philosophy. In teaching 101, why wouldn't you also use the unnecessary terms as a bridge, as Rorty does?

Edited June 21, 2021 by CV75

[mfbukowski]

1 hour ago, CV75 said:

Yes, I understand your eventual aim is to rationally justify religious experience through philosophy. In teaching 101, why wouldn't you also use the unnecessary terms as a bridge, as Rorty does?

Nobody gets Rorty apparently so how will that help??

You understand Rorty better than my explanation of Rorty?

All the philosophers I have quoted have already justified religious experience, and yet we still get the yahoos quoting or thinking like Dawkins every day!

There's probably a dozen on this board today, and people are still losing faith because of idiotic arguments! 

"Where is the evidence?"

Right there where all evidence is, in human experience! 

But this experience is like falling in love and knowing your purpose in life.

It drives me nuts! 😡

Edited June 21, 2021 by mfbukowski

[poptart]

20 hours ago, mfbukowski said:

Yeah especially all those rich and  privileged folks coming across our borders coming into our country to do Glamping here in California under the freeway bridges.   And besides being rich, they all tend to vote Republican.

Uh huh.  🙄

They actually are trying to hide their identity by pretending to be poor, everyone knows that.  

You really need to get over your classist stereotypes

At least there are some parishes that help these people, here have a better example.

Pope Francis' Silence Speaks Volumes on Controversial Communion Vote by US Bishops - The New York Times (nytimes.com)

Pope Francis and a lot of the Catholic world can't get over how people like this including their privileged followers are doing this yet here we are.  

Check your privilege.  

20 hours ago, Calm said:

He seems to me to be consistently more focused on economic classes stereotypes.  So is the BoM (for good reason).  Don’t know poptart’s experiences, so can’t judge if his responses are fair or not.  If he is at least semi accurate in his tales of his youth, his focus on hypocrisy of the better off makes sense.

Not sure if that was a typo, racist no, economic classes yes absolutely.    Here's something folks on the religious right don't like to hear, likes of me came about due to things happening to us as children that were beyond our control then being stepped on.  We grew up to be the adults we are now and we outnumber and outvote them.  They can go on all they like about rich religious types having the most kids, they still depend on society for safe schools and places for their children to grow up. They are losing numbers and people of different beliefs are moving into their areas.  I have no children and the caucasian side here really doesn't care for us (at least the younger ones).  Religious conservatives have far, far more to lose than the likes of me do, if they do start bringing religious orgs to heel I kind of doubt there's many places in the world that you can get away with what you can here.  All I'm doing is sitting back and watching, more time goes by more i'm enjoying this free source of entertainment.  

[CV75]

2 hours ago, mfbukowski said:

Nobody gets Rorty apparently so how will that help??

You understand Rorty better than my explanation of Rorty?

All the philosophers I have quoted have already justified religious experience, and yet we still get the yahoos quoting or thinking like Dawkins every day!

There's probably a dozen on this board today, and people are still losing faith because of idiotic arguments! 

"Where is the evidence?"

Right there where all evidence is, in human experience! 

But this experience is like falling in love and knowing your purpose in life.

It drives me nuts! 😡

I'm suggesting that introducing a new concept to others is facilitated by changing the terminology by degrees. Rorty (in your siggy) is describing both sides of experience at once; similarly, I think you can describe "both sides" -- one's view and yours -- by starting with their language and transitioning it to yours.

[Teancum]

8 hours ago, SeekingUnderstanding said:

Hi Mr Bukowski, 

As someone who struggles to follow any deep philosophical post beyond the basics, is there an accessible introductory book out there that covers the basics? The closest I've gotten is "The Big Picture" by Sean Carroll and that was written by a physicist. I gotta believe there is better out there...

I listened to the great courses "The Modern Intellectual Tradition: From Descartes to Derrida" but no great understanding followed. I've tried listening to some of your posts of Rorty, but it still feels pretty inaccessible to me. Like I don't speak the right language.

Thanks,

John

My sentiments as well...

[Teancum]

5 hours ago, mfbukowski said:

Nobody gets Rorty apparently so how will that help??

You understand Rorty better than my explanation of Rorty?

All the philosophers I have quoted have already justified religious experience, and yet we still get the yahoos quoting or thinking like Dawkins every day!

There's probably a dozen on this board today, and people are still losing faith because of idiotic arguments! 

"Where is the evidence?"

Right there where all evidence is, in human experience! 

But this experience is like falling in love and knowing your purpose in life.

It drives me nuts! 😡

Ok so I am reading through this thread and have more than once and still struggle to get my head around it.  I can grasp that experience is crucial and all we have is what we experience.  Thus there are potentially 7 billion plus realities because we all look inward out. I often have and do feel like an island. And a lonely one at that sometimes  I cannot see the world in anyway but from my own experiential view and cannot see yours, my wife's or anyone's other than what they try to communicate to me and communication seems clumsy at times.  And then there are emotions and I cannot feel what anyone else feels not they me. 

So how does this tie to learning religious or "truth?  And if it  is all experiences why do so many have conflicting experiences that speak to a "truth" the conflicts with yours or mine?  How can this be reliable if so many come to varying conclusions under the similar method, knowingly or not?   

[mfbukowski]

17 hours ago, Teancum said:

Ok so I am reading through this thread and have more than once and still struggle to get my head around it.  I can grasp that experience is crucial and all we have is what we experience.  Thus there are potentially 7 billion plus realities because we all look inward out. I often have and do feel like an island. And a lonely one at that sometimes  I cannot see the world in anyway but from my own experiential view and cannot see yours, my wife's or anyone's other than what they try to communicate to me and communication seems clumsy at times.  And then there are emotions and I cannot feel what anyone else feels not they me. 

So how does this tie to learning religious or "truth?  And if it  is all experiences why do so many have conflicting experiences that speak to a "truth" the conflicts with yours or mine?  How can this be reliable if so many come to varying conclusions under the similar method, knowingly or not?   

How did you get the idea that there is one universal "truth"?

(I know, but look at it as I see it and a large subset of the philosophical community)

I have not lived your life

Can I know what It is to be you? We cannot even agree on what "real"

Your childhood, your courtship, your good and bad experiences?

Have you had the experience of being Babe Ruth?

A famous scientist? A homeless person in India ?

Has God spoken to you?

Can you build a nuclear bomb?

Which of those experiences are true or false?

Yet we agree about many experience, REPORTS that it is hot today, the temperature of water when it boils, what "North" means and experiences we can all verify by doing the same thing.  We can follow a recipe and get the " same" cake.

Are there "true" cakes made from the same recipe?

No, but a REPORT that eating the cake was  a "tasty" experience could be true or false if a group finds it to be.

The cake is not true, but experience reports if they agree, can be.

Science is in the same category as recipes

This is also the category of experience in which science works.

Experiences are tested and can be, all over the world.

"Substance A mixed with substance B yields substance C."

This form of a sentence, like a recipe, which provides the same "experiences" can be replicated all over the world.  The descriptions of these "same" experiences are called "objective" experiences.

When a community agrees on a an experience REPORT, it is described as "true"

It's up to a peer group to agree on what experience reports are "true".

Scientific experience reports are made true by peer review... until better paradigms come along

People in testimony meeting in "peer review" declare their experience reports saying that they "know the church is true"

And their declaration can be as true as that of the scientist, verified by experience.

... to be continued, no more time today. 

CONTINUATION

So what this is all about is a different way of thinking about truth and reality than most folks are used to, and this "new" method (at least 150 years old, with roots going back to ancient times- the philosopher Heraclitus)

This idea of "peer review" is very important- there are philosophers who believe that saying something is "true" has no more meaning than "I agree with you"

 So since all we have that we KNOW - or another way of saying it- since all we have is human experience, all we have to go on is how things "appear" to us as filtered through the 4 ambiguous filters I mentioned above.  

But there is a whole other area of experience we have not looked at in any detail, and that is experiences we cannot convey to others because they are private- such as perhaps happens between loving couples, or experiences of preference (Cashew Ice Cream is the BEST) or experiences which have given us our political opinions, or religous experience.

These are "private" in that they cannot be adequately expressed through language.   What does it feel like to take a cool shower on a summer's day after working in the yard?  Why is cashew ice cream "the best"?    Why and how do you love your significant other?

These are expressions of experiences which cannot be universally agreed upon by everyone.

If anyone boils water, it will boil anywhere at the "same temperature" (adjusted for altitude etc.)  On the other hand, 

I will not fall in love with the same person you fall in love with.  We will differ on interpretations of words.   We may agree or not agree on politics.  We may not agree on our preferences in music.

Those are actually some of perhaps many "private" experiences which are not "factual"- meaning that  NOT all people have experienced them.   I have never been to Antiarctica, and never had that experience. 

These are experiences which can be "peer reviewed" ONLY by people who agree with us on these topics- because all of humanity has not had the same experiences I have had, or they have interpreted them differently.

These are the kind of experiences in the category of "religious experience", they are not interpreted universally as "religious "

None of these experience are "objective" except to the communities which have experienced them.   But for members of the community, they can be as "objective" as anything in science, in their peer group.

And so the belief in God can evolve to certainty with enough experiences, as certain as anything can be.  And "I know the church is true" is as clear as "I know how to boil water". 

Edited June 22, 2021 by mfbukowski

[mfbukowski]

19 hours ago, Teancum said:

Ok so I am reading through this thread and have more than once and still struggle to get my head around it.  I can grasp that experience is crucial and all we have is what we experience.  Thus there are potentially 7 billion plus realities because we all look inward out. I often have and do feel like an island. And a lonely one at that sometimes  I cannot see the world in anyway but from my own experiential view and cannot see yours, my wife's or anyone's other than what they try to communicate to me and communication seems clumsy at times.  And then there are emotions and I cannot feel what anyone else feels not they me. 

So how does this tie to learning religious or "truth?  And if it  is all experiences why do so many have conflicting experiences that speak to a "truth" the conflicts with yours or mine?  How can this be reliable if so many come to varying conclusions under the similar method, knowingly or not?   

Nothing is reliable unless you have experienced it to be reliable.  Experience wins.

It's important to learn to live with ambiguity and uncertainty.  That's where "hope for things unseen" comes in.

And on the scientific side, hat is where the "Perry Scheme" comes in, and thanks Kevin for that point.

There are tons of other studies that verify the same results in different ways

Here are some:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ambiguity_tolerance–intolerance

 

Edited June 22, 2021 by mfbukowski

[MosiahFree]

On 6/20/2021 at 5:27 PM, mfbukowski said:

Ok out of church and Father's day obligations.  I wish they didn't do this stuff but don't tell anybody.  I have tried- but "Tradition"!!  Nice ideas fossilized into eternal truth.

I hope you had a pleasant Father’s Day. I’m gonna respond to your comments out of chronological order and in a way that is linked more thematically.

Quote

He is trying to hammer it into the heads of traditionalists that the world is made of paradigms, but it has little effect. I have the same problem he does.   I hammer my Rorty quote below and no one gets it.  It could change their lives if they got it. This is the purpose of this discussion- how can we do it better, and you might be onto something.

Here I have to caution against mission drift. Are you trying to effect change on the LDS cultural attitudes towards the discipline of philosophy or are we trying to give a reasoned account of the hope that is within us while honoring Christ in our hearts? If it is the former then I am at a loss on what to do, but if it is the latter I might have something to say.

Let’s say there is a young man by the name of Bill in his early 20s who has become disaffected with the Church. Suppose it started with something political, and through social media discovers the CES Letter and his motivation to maintain even a semblance of activity disappears. Bill enrolls at a community college and decides that he is going to fill out some graduation requirements in the Liberal Arts before diving into a Nursing program. Bill is attracted to philosophy and anthropology and takes a handful of courses in each: ‘Critical Thinking’ gives him a bit of logic and introduces him to basic reasoning strategies, ‘Introduction to Philosophy’ acquaints him with the standard array of philosophical problems in metaphysics, epistemology, and moral philosophy. A course in physical anthropology gives him  a survey of human evolution and a course in cultural anthropology exposes him to the vast array of diversity in the practice of religion.

Bill polishes off his associates degree and plunges headlong into his nursing program. During his down time he starts visiting atheist message boards, getting into atheist themed podcasts. He supplements his atheistic media consumption with books; A.C. Grayling’s ‘The God Argument’, Frans De Waal’s ‘The Bonobo and The Atheist’, and Bart Ehrman’s ‘God’s Problem’. At this point Bill is getting dissatisfied with his participation in atheist circles and decides to come to Mormon Dialogue and Discussion so he can talk to people who don’t already agree with him.

Bill is no scholar, but then again he isn’t a rube either. He has a liking for bombastic atheistic rhetoric, but knows just enough about certain topics to sound authoritative. Eventually Bill is going to encounter someone like mfbukowski who has been an active Mormon longer than Bill has been alive and knows much more about the philosophical issues Bill employs in his attacks on the faith. How to proceed then?

Well first is the issue of the audience, there are two dimensions to take into consideration. The primary audience is Bill himself and the various other participants posting exchanges with Bill. Now everyone wants to reach Bill and get him to question some of his presumptions and open him back up to the reality of Christ’s church here on earth, but Bill is human and we know that the likelihood of him having a change of heart at the end of a long disputation on the internet is almost nil. What we hope to achieve is imparting on Bill some questions and observations that stick with him that can later develop into having a meaningful change of heart and mind.

The second dimension is the unseen audience. These are the lurkers on the website who are reading the exchange but not participating. Lurkers are largely going to consist of current members who are struggling privately, with some curious investigators thrown in who navigated their way here by means of a rabbit hole and are enjoying the show. Appropriately, a lot of LDS apologists and organizations focus on this audience, because those are two kinds of people apologists are interested in reaching; keeping people in and bringing the Gospel to those who don’t have it. Guiding a former member back can be an involved and difficult process, there are so many factors that contribute to someone leaving that often an apologist just isn’t equipped to help someone in the way they need to be helped. Better to help folks avoid ever getting to where Bill is.

This is where occupational hazards come into play, because now apologetics stops being a private intellectual practice and becomes something more performative. We become conscious of how we are interacting with Bill and how that might come across to the unseen audience out there and we find ourselves torn between acting with grace and throwing back at Bill the same attitude he gives us. We want to exude confidence in confronting Bill’s arguments while dismantling them because there are stakes above and beyond our respective egos and sense of personal satisfaction.

Temptations become abundant, ranging from wanting to indulge in exaggeration, doing unnecessary flourishes to show off, developing tunnel vision, and using risky shortcuts, among other dangers. Now even if we set aside our disagreement about the substance and quality of Kevin Christensen’s apologetic writing, he still engages in these temptations more often than not and I can’t help but point out how much they undermine his apologetics. An example might help illustrate my point.

I think Kevin’s review of Thomas Riskas’ book ‘Deconstructing Mormonism’ is a good piece to use, because Kevin and I probably fully agree that the Riskas book has no redeeming qualities to it and probably does more to misinform and confuse people than help them get a solid grip on the attending issues, ex-mormon or otherwise. Now consider this snippet from the essay:        

Quote

How does he go about deconstructing Mormonism? Not the way Jacques Derrida would. (Derrida is not listed in the bibliography, a fact that may matter only to those with enough background with the term to wonder about the significance of a title promising to “deconstruct” something.)

If I were writing a review of Stephen P. Stich’s ‘Deconstructing the Mind’ for a philosophy journal and I wrote the following:

Quote

How does he go about deconstructing the mind? Not the way Jacques Derrida would. (Derrida is not listed in the bibliography, a fact that may matter only to those with enough background with the term to wonder about the significance of a title promising to “deconstruct” something.)

Now I can tell you the above would never be printed in a professionally referred philosophy journal. Even though it is completely true that Stich’s book never mentions anything related to Derrida and bears no resemblance to Derrida’s work, the English word “deconstructing” isn’t some neologism that Derrida coined and has a semantic domain above and beyond the philosophical project of Derrida. Stich’s use is totally appropriate and so is Riskas’s use.

More to the point the editor would never include this criticism, not only because it is an absurd complaint, but because the damage it could potentially do not only to the author, but to the journal's reputation. If I put that in print and included it on my C.V. and a hiring committee saw it, I’d immediately no longer be in consideration. I don’t think I’m being hyperbolic here in the least, just stating a reality.

Now this throwaway comment from Kevin isn’t that much of a problem in the big picture, The Interpreter isn’t some academic journal, but a parochial publication and it doesn’t need to meet academic standards in every piece to do good work. The meat of Kevin’s critique doesn’t rely on or need this comment in any way and it could be discarded without impacting the integrity of the review. It is a mistake, but not a fatal one.

From an apologetic framework this is a tactical error. A knowledgeable critic could capitalize on this and make a big show of it as a means to discredit Kevin and cast doubt on his entire review. Now is that fair and measured? Not at all, but this is a matter of being rhetorically effective in the contentious world of apologetics and if we are being honest, at least this hypothetical critic is actually highlighting an actual mistake where Kevin was not.

Now I obviously don’t know the state of Kevin’s mind when he wrote the review, but if I’m allowed a bit of speculation I’d say he fell prey to the temptations I mentioned above. Just like me, he probably saw Riskas stumbling through philosophical matters in the introduction and could tell right away the guy was out of his element. I bet Kevin focused in on that and in trying to flex on Riskas with his own familiarity with philosophical literature, got carried away and included that Derrida comment.

Quote

 

And regarding the obscurity of Fontinell, you have to realize I met him in 1970 after studying James and Wittgenstein, and Rorty as a "philosopher" as opposed to his switch to "literature", quite extensively.   I was deep into Dewey's "Reconstruction in Philosophy" and the finally-seen-as-contextual- notion of what Nietzsche 'really' meant by "God is Dead"- yes the false god of the Enlightenment was in deed dead. 

And then I took classes with Fontinell and the other guys there at CUNY Queens who were all Jamesians and process/Pragmatist guys.  Classes on Whitehead, Heidegger etc. 

I hated phenomenology because it was not linguistic analysis, but I got better!

And I had a good background in Kant and on up through the Germans from my bachelor's at UCLA when there were guys there like Robert C. Solomon and David Lewis while I was there:  Lewis was a very "far out" human being, totally socially inept and a complete philosophy nerd, while Solomon was the total opposite personally.

 

There isn’t anything wrong with what you are saying here as far as I’m concerned and I totally get what you are saying and understand you are telling me all this to give me a bit about your background and where you are coming from. That is all kosher, so to speak.

Yet we might as well be two trekkies vigorously debating the leadership capabilities of James T. Kirk vs Jean-Luc Picard in the foyer. Nearby people might get amused and try to listen in, but the nuances and charm of the conversation isn’t going to be available to them unless they are already initiated into the strange world of the fandom. 

When Bill shows up to talk about how the scientific method is the ideal epistemology, how strong naturalistic accounts of morality are, and how the problem of evil shows how the Gospel fails to materialize, I think you would meet Bill head on. I think your go to strategy would be to talk a bit about your education, name some philosophers you studied under, and start referencing books Bill isn’t aware of and likely won’t read anytime soon. You’d probably finish off with some open ended questions accompanied with some emojis to help de-escalate the exchange.

I’d like you to re-think that strategy, while you may be mentioning names and giving references in an attempt to shorten the length of response and to be helpful, it can create a lot more avenues to dispute that can be counterproductive. 

For example, I think the philosophy of William James is actually quite hostile to the beliefs of the Saints. I think the conjunction of ‘The Meaning of Truth’ and the essays in ‘Radical Empiricism’ are about as compatible with the Book of Mormon as the work of Sigmund Freud. Now I’m sure you’d disagree with my sentiments and are tempted to challenge them, and we might even have a fun and fruitful discussion, but we’d be back to being trekkies in the foyer.

You have a certain charm in your posting that can work to your advantage; there is an authenticity to your mannerisms that I think make people more open to you and your enthusiasm helps a great deal as well. I think you’d have a lot more success in reaching people if you focused on your own ideas and developed your writing/thinking towards a more general audience in lieu of giving Richard Rorty interviews. All due respect to Rorty, but even a number of philosophers today don’t have the constitution for listening to him talk about Cartesian Dualism and the correspondence of language to reality in his wilting trans-Atlantic accent. 

I’m more than happy to help you do this, but this post is too long as it is and I want to read everything you’ve said so far in regards to experience. 
 

[SeekingUnderstanding]

On 6/21/2021 at 11:22 AM, mfbukowski said:

Well thanks for that- you are part of a potential audience for this project so if you are willing to help out by giving me comments then that would help.

I want to make this also a reply to @CV75 as well.

I was thinking about how I learned this stuff growing up and experiences I have had that helped me understand the philosophy as I got older so maybe in a way I was "born" to it and that is why I don't SEE why others don't SEE it as I do!

I was born with a lazy eye- my left eye and right eye have never quite presented my brain the same image, and until I went to school with eye tests etc, I did not know that was not "normal".  After that, it became pretty much corrected through exercises and eyepatches etc- but now I am getting older it has returned with a vengence!  

So as a kid my brain got different images from each of my eyes- of course it was just that the angle of vision between the two did not co-ordinate well.

Then once I overheard a conversation between my dad and his grandmother- born in the 1860's in Poland-  this was in the mid 1950's- about atomic theory.  He told her that the chair she was sitting in was not "really" an assemblage of solid pieces of wood, but a bunch of tiny tiny "balls" moving around and that there was more space between them than substance.   She looked at him, her wonderful engineer great grandson who made airplanes in America, and flipped out.  She wanted to call a doctor because something was wrong with his head, or he had been poisoned!!  

So I thought of that, and thought about my eye, and how that they each had different perspectives on what was "real"

Then in 8th grade in Catholic school, a group of us wanted to put on a "Passon Play" for the parish ("Ward" in Mormonese)  But how could we do that?  One of the members of our youth group's dad was in the movie business and a fairly well known actor and he had some ideas.  Why not get a large sheet of material and hang it like a curtain- but very tight one- on the front of the stage of the church hall- and from the back of the cloth, project shadows of the events of the crucifixion onto the screen, in shadow form?  From the front of the screen you wouldn't see the kids "as they were" from one perspective- wearing bathrobes pretending to be people from Jerusalem 2000 years ago- but from the front of the screen you would only see the shadows of the events in Christ's life.   We had a tape recorder and recorded some music from religous movies- and then got a kid who's voice changed early- to read the script at the right times while the "actors" in bathrobes acted it out in front of the light bulb, and invited the parish to come to our show!

The reaction was overwhelming!  There wasn't a dry eye in the house!  The "reality" was a bunch of kids in bathrobes but the "experience" projected out to the world and interpreted by the audience was absolutely stunning

So which side of the screen represented "reality" better?   Neither really- yet the experiences between the kids and the audience were vastly different.

Where is "TRVTH" etched in stone on the top of some Greek temple in these "realities".  There is no need for the word used in that context.

And even in the stories above, I gave my perspectives, not all possible perspectives of what was happening to each individual who had their individual experiences- the kid who did the music- etc

And later in my church life, I thought of the veil in the temple.

There was no need for the word "reality" in describing those experiences, the experiences just WERE!

So Rorty is trying to explain that in philosophese, and uses all the terms I would outlaw because he is describing both sides of experience at once.

 

We know that there is "something" causing these experiences- is it what we call the atoms in the chair or the wood we experience? Neither and both.  We haven't talked about quarks, or whatever else could "cause" the experience, the particles or waves or neurological effects etc etc etc- where IS the "TRVTH"?  It is a useless concept in this situation.

So common sense tells us there is some kind of cause of the perception but we can only see it AS we see it.  But we can make up sentences- as I am now- which might be true or false.   Did I get the description of the light waves right?   Was I lying about the other stories?   All those could be true or false- but the "reality" is not true or false.  There is nothing to pin down in the "reality" because there are so many perspectives possible in "seeing" the "reality"

Where there are no sentences, there is no "truth" because we cannot get outside our perceptions and really even express what is "really" going on.

Sentences are always trapped in the human world of experience.   They describe human experience and cannot do anything else.

The causes of experience cannot be described because all we can know is the experience.

Did this help anything?

“Did this help anything?”

Sort of? I’d still love to see a text for outsiders that explained the predominant modern schools of thought if that exists. 
 

I think I can get behind everything you’ve said here. As a foundation for everything all we have is our experience. 
 

That said, I have a question for you (in next post)

[SeekingUnderstanding]

21 hours ago, mfbukowski said:

When a community agrees on a an experience REPORT, it is described as "true"

It's up to a peer group to agree on what experience reports are "true".

Scientific experience reports are made true by peer review... until better paradigms come along

Let’s say I belong to the religion of chocolate ice cream lovers. As an article of faith we believe that after trying all the flavors, everyone will agree that chocolate is the best (unless they are deceived by the adversary). 
 

Is it modern philosophers’ opinion that this statement is as “true” and “valid” as say the science behind atomic fission?

Edited June 23, 2021 by SeekingUnderstanding

[mfbukowski]

1 hour ago, MosiahFree said:

I hope you had a pleasant Father’s Day. I’m gonna respond to your comments out of chronological order and in a way that is linked more thematically.

Here I have to caution against mission drift. Are you trying to effect change on the LDS cultural attitudes towards the discipline of philosophy or are we trying to give a reasoned account of the hope that is within us while honoring Christ in our hearts? If it is the former then I am at a loss on what to do, but if it is the latter I might have something to say.

Let’s say there is a young man by the name of Bill in his early 20s who has become disaffected with the Church. Suppose it started with something political, and through social media discovers the CES Letter and his motivation to maintain even a semblance of activity disappears. Bill enrolls at a community college and decides that he is going to fill out some graduation requirements in the Liberal Arts before diving into a Nursing program. Bill is attracted to philosophy and anthropology and takes a handful of courses in each: ‘Critical Thinking’ gives him a bit of logic and introduces him to basic reasoning strategies, ‘Introduction to Philosophy’ acquaints him with the standard array of philosophical problems in metaphysics, epistemology, and moral philosophy. A course in physical anthropology gives him  a survey of human evolution and a course in cultural anthropology exposes him to the vast array of diversity in the practice of religion.

Bill polishes off his associates degree and plunges headlong into his nursing program. During his down time he starts visiting atheist message boards, getting into atheist themed podcasts. He supplements his atheistic media consumption with books; A.C. Grayling’s ‘The God Argument’, Frans De Waal’s ‘The Bonobo and The Atheist’, and Bart Ehrman’s ‘God’s Problem’. At this point Bill is getting dissatisfied with his participation in atheist circles and decides to come to Mormon Dialogue and Discussion so he can talk to people who don’t already agree with him.

Bill is no scholar, but then again he isn’t a rube either. He has a liking for bombastic atheistic rhetoric, but knows just enough about certain topics to sound authoritative. Eventually Bill is going to encounter someone like mfbukowski who has been an active Mormon longer than Bill has been alive and knows much more about the philosophical issues Bill employs in his attacks on the faith. How to proceed then?

Well first is the issue of the audience, there are two dimensions to take into consideration. The primary audience is Bill himself and the various other participants posting exchanges with Bill. Now everyone wants to reach Bill and get him to question some of his presumptions and open him back up to the reality of Christ’s church here on earth, but Bill is human and we know that the likelihood of him having a change of heart at the end of a long disputation on the internet is almost nil. What we hope to achieve is imparting on Bill some questions and observations that stick with him that can later develop into having a meaningful change of heart and mind.

The second dimension is the unseen audience. These are the lurkers on the website who are reading the exchange but not participating. Lurkers are largely going to consist of current members who are struggling privately, with some curious investigators thrown in who navigated their way here by means of a rabbit hole and are enjoying the show. Appropriately, a lot of LDS apologists and organizations focus on this audience, because those are two kinds of people apologists are interested in reaching; keeping people in and bringing the Gospel to those who don’t have it. Guiding a former member back can be an involved and difficult process, there are so many factors that contribute to someone leaving that often an apologist just isn’t equipped to help someone in the way they need to be helped. Better to help folks avoid ever getting to where Bill is.

This is where occupational hazards come into play, because now apologetics stops being a private intellectual practice and becomes something more performative. We become conscious of how we are interacting with Bill and how that might come across to the unseen audience out there and we find ourselves torn between acting with grace and throwing back at Bill the same attitude he gives us. We want to exude confidence in confronting Bill’s arguments while dismantling them because there are stakes above and beyond our respective egos and sense of personal satisfaction.

Temptations become abundant, ranging from wanting to indulge in exaggeration, doing unnecessary flourishes to show off, developing tunnel vision, and using risky shortcuts, among other dangers. Now even if we set aside our disagreement about the substance and quality of Kevin Christensen’s apologetic writing, he still engages in these temptations more often than not and I can’t help but point out how much they undermine his apologetics. An example might help illustrate my point.

I think Kevin’s review of Thomas Riskas’ book ‘Deconstructing Mormonism’ is a good piece to use, because Kevin and I probably fully agree that the Riskas book has no redeeming qualities to it and probably does more to misinform and confuse people than help them get a solid grip on the attending issues, ex-mormon or otherwise. Now consider this snippet from the essay:        

If I were writing a review of Stephen P. Stich’s ‘Deconstructing the Mind’ for a philosophy journal and I wrote the following:

Now I can tell you the above would never be printed in a professionally referred philosophy journal. Even though it is completely true that Stich’s book never mentions anything related to Derrida and bears no resemblance to Derrida’s work, the English word “deconstructing” isn’t some neologism that Derrida coined and has a semantic domain above and beyond the philosophical project of Derrida. Stich’s use is totally appropriate and so is Riskas’s use.

More to the point the editor would never include this criticism, not only because it is an absurd complaint, but because the damage it could potentially do not only to the author, but to the journal's reputation. If I put that in print and included it on my C.V. and a hiring committee saw it, I’d immediately no longer be in consideration. I don’t think I’m being hyperbolic here in the least, just stating a reality.

Now this throwaway comment from Kevin isn’t that much of a problem in the big picture, The Interpreter isn’t some academic journal, but a parochial publication and it doesn’t need to meet academic standards in every piece to do good work. The meat of Kevin’s critique doesn’t rely on or need this comment in any way and it could be discarded without impacting the integrity of the review. It is a mistake, but not a fatal one.

From an apologetic framework this is a tactical error. A knowledgeable critic could capitalize on this and make a big show of it as a means to discredit Kevin and cast doubt on his entire review. Now is that fair and measured? Not at all, but this is a matter of being rhetorically effective in the contentious world of apologetics and if we are being honest, at least this hypothetical critic is actually highlighting an actual mistake where Kevin was not.

Now I obviously don’t know the state of Kevin’s mind when he wrote the review, but if I’m allowed a bit of speculation I’d say he fell prey to the temptations I mentioned above. Just like me, he probably saw Riskas stumbling through philosophical matters in the introduction and could tell right away the guy was out of his element. I bet Kevin focused in on that and in trying to flex on Riskas with his own familiarity with philosophical literature, got carried away and included that Derrida comment.

There isn’t anything wrong with what you are saying here as far as I’m concerned and I totally get what you are saying and understand you are telling me all this to give me a bit about your background and where you are coming from. That is all kosher, so to speak.

Yet we might as well be two trekkies vigorously debating the leadership capabilities of James T. Kirk vs Jean-Luc Picard in the foyer. Nearby people might get amused and try to listen in, but the nuances and charm of the conversation isn’t going to be available to them unless they are already initiated into the strange world of the fandom. 

When Bill shows up to talk about how the scientific method is the ideal epistemology, how strong naturalistic accounts of morality are, and how the problem of evil shows how the Gospel fails to materialize, I think you would meet Bill head on. I think your go to strategy would be to talk a bit about your education, name some philosophers you studied under, and start referencing books Bill isn’t aware of and likely won’t read anytime soon. You’d probably finish off with some open ended questions accompanied with some emojis to help de-escalate the exchange.

I’d like you to re-think that strategy, while you may be mentioning names and giving references in an attempt to shorten the length of response and to be helpful, it can create a lot more avenues to dispute that can be counterproductive. 

For example, I think the philosophy of William James is actually quite hostile to the beliefs of the Saints. I think the conjunction of ‘The Meaning of Truth’ and the essays in ‘Radical Empiricism’ are about as compatible with the Book of Mormon as the work of Sigmund Freud. Now I’m sure you’d disagree with my sentiments and are tempted to challenge them, and we might even have a fun and fruitful discussion, but we’d be back to being trekkies in the foyer.

You have a certain charm in your posting that can work to your advantage; there is an authenticity to your mannerisms that I think make people more open to you and your enthusiasm helps a great deal as well. I think you’d have a lot more success in reaching people if you focused on your own ideas and developed your writing/thinking towards a more general audience in lieu of giving Richard Rorty interviews. All due respect to Rorty, but even a number of philosophers today don’t have the constitution for listening to him talk about Cartesian Dualism and the correspondence of language to reality in his wilting trans-Atlantic accent. 

I’m more than happy to help you do this, but this post is too long as it is and I want to read everything you’ve said so far in regards to experience. 
 

Great post, thanks, and I agree with what you are pointing out.

Yes these are the problems I am facing and am acutely aware of them.

Of course my tone is different in something more formal than this- but part of my motivation in this thread was to see if my "pure experience fictitious world" approach was effective.

I am happy to take all the help I can in getting this project moving forward!  I see it as a communal issue anyway- this is not about me, but about getting people to think in a way that is "new" to them but yet which is solid and reliable philosophy, at least to a large portion of philosophers today both in analysis and continental schools.

The bottom line is that I feel that if I could wave a magic wand and if everyone could see it as I do, there would be no need for apologetics! 

I think we probably both looked at Riskas book probably as Kevin did and immediately saw it as a worthless argument while everyone else was flipping out.  And then there was the watchamacallit letter.   Same thing. 

You nailed my view on Riskas.  Nothing there.

Regarding Rorty one of the points I like is the fact that he started out in philosophy and then ended up in literature.

 The scriptures are literature inspired by God - direct experience, unmediated at first, then filtered through a human brain and culture.

Philosophy of language is not theology- and of course we know Mormons don't do "theology" but they can develop better ways of scriptural interpretation.

More later- 

[MosiahFree]

21 hours ago, mfbukowski said:

Great post, thanks, and I agree with what you are pointing out.

Yes these are the problems I am facing and am acutely aware of them.

Of course my tone is different in something more formal than this- but part of my motivation in this thread was to see if my "pure experience fictitious world" approach was effective.

I am happy to take all the help I can in getting this project moving forward!  I see it as a communal issue anyway- this is not about me, but about getting people to think in a way that is "new" to them but yet which is solid and reliable philosophy, at least to a large portion of philosophers today both in analysis and continental schools.

The bottom line is that I feel that if I could wave a magic wand and if everyone could see it as I do, there would be no need for apologetics! 

I think we probably both looked at Riskas book probably as Kevin did and immediately saw it as a worthless argument while everyone else was flipping out.  And then there was the watchamacallit letter.   Same thing. 

You nailed my view on Riskas.  Nothing there.

Regarding Rorty one of the points I like is the fact that he started out in philosophy and then ended up in literature.

 The scriptures are literature inspired by God - direct experience, unmediated at first, then filtered through a human brain and culture.

Philosophy of language is not theology- and of course we know Mormons don't do "theology" but they can develop better ways of scriptural interpretation.

More later- 

I actually have a request to get the ball rolling. Could you provide us with a definition of experience that matches how you would use it in your philosophical discussions in paragraph format? I do have some conditions to help you focus your thoughts (and my reasons for including them are to follow shortly): (a) Your audience is American highschool students getting ready to graduate, they are literate but completely ignorant of philosophy in the formal sense, (b) No references to books or philosophers, but you can reference culturally relevant media if desired, (c) You can’t ask any questions, even of the rhetorical variety, in the paragraph, (d) You have a hard limit at 500 words and a hard minimum of 50 words, (e) You have as much time as you need to write it.

You have a habit of going about these discussions in a socratic fashion where you often intersperse your answers with open ended questions, as if you are leaving a breadcrumb trail to your bigger point that the other person could follow on their own if so inclined. While I think this is entirely appropriate in some contexts, I think it works against you here on the board. 

This also leads me to bring up that you tend to respond to people in terse sentences and each sentence has an entire line break between them. This creates a psychological tendency in your readers to disconnect each sentence from each other and the thread of your thinking is lost. I’m not suggesting that you stop doing this in all your posts, only that for the purposes of this request you abstain from the habit.

Don’t put too much effort into this either, because whatever it is you write will be insufficient and will undergo multiple revisions as we go on. The benefit of starting with the topic of “experience” is that it is totally universal to all humans and you needn’t work to make it relevant to an audience of Mormons. I want you to feel confident in this definition, you don’t have to rely on any sources other than yourself. You are the one going to be using the word in what is ultimately your philosophical project, you have complete autonomy if defining the word how you want as long as you make it clear to your readers what the parameters are. 

I look forward to reading it.

[OGHoosier]

On 6/20/2021 at 11:58 AM, mfbukowski said:

 

Those were exactly the comments from W I was avoiding for fear of losing the very lieralistic LDS audience who are still caught in Cartesian dualism and absolute "truth" without knowing how that opens them up to all the anti arguments there are.

I read those quotes from Wittgenstein and I agree, those are almost offensive to my Western literalist LDS mind. Yet Wittgenstein was a genius philosopher, truly pathbreaking, and this whispers to me that the world which appears so obvious to me is not in fact so. I'm mostly familiar with Cartesian dualism in the sense of philosophy of mind and substance dualism. How does it relate to the concept of "truth"?

As an aside, my studies in philosophy have impressed me with nothing so strongly as the idea that everything Descartes ever said was wrong. 

I've been doing some reading in epistemology lately, especially regarding Reidian epistemology and Reformed Epistemology. It swirls around the idea of "properly basic" beliefs: beliefs we believe for no reason but that we believe them. The validity of sense experience can be confirmed by nothing but itself: even the concurring witness of 7 billion other humans to our experience of a green tree would still be mediated to us through the same sensory faculties that gave us the green tree experience in the first place. Likewise, our belief in reason can be confirmed by nothing but reason itself (and heaven knows that reason can be as contradictory as anything. Reason, for all that we consider it a common and singular faculty, has as much contradiction and disunion in it, I dare say, as religion does.) The same with belief in other minds and many other foundational beliefs which we believe for no reason at all...other than that we observe them and can't not believe in them. This sort of prepares me for the idea that maybe my inborn foundationalist conception of "truth" is not on the level, but seeing the dots connect and truly feeling them connect, believing and accepting the connection are different things entirely. Yet another step in my ever increasing dissent from the paradigm of objective rationality. 

Anyways, I want to discuss this portion of the your highlight if you have time. 

Quote

Third, experience is traditionally seen as tied to the past or as "given"; in its pragmatic mode it is experiential, oriented to changing the given, and thereby having connection with the future as its salient trait. 

This is hard to understand. I read the the traditional view of experience as "experiences are typically regarded as data points which are established in the past and which we reference as we predict and experience the future." With this conception in mind I cannot understand the rest of it, which makes me think my interpretation must be wrong. What does it mean to "change the given" or to have "connection with the future as its salient trait?" I have lived all of my life taking my experience down as "data points", if you will, which I use to create models of the world. How could there be any other way to live?

This last question, of course, is the question of one who has yet to see, as I have yet to do. 

Edited June 24, 2021 by OGHoosier

[The Nehor]

On 6/20/2021 at 9:33 PM, mfbukowski said:

Yes, you know that is the way that most philosophy tests worked when I was in school, of course especially in the graduate level classes.

It's a little hard to do multiple guess tests.  

"Of the below 6 definitions of existence, which is the best?"   

And yes trying to put these questions into the cultural vernacular is absolutely the hardest especially when you are trying to put across ideas which are NOT in the "cultural vernacular" because you are trying to illustrateto people what is wrong with the only way they know of thinking about things. 

So you have to use the cultural vernacular to express things that that vernacular is not capable, by definition, of expressing.

 

C.S. Lewis acknowledged the difficulty. This wasn’t something he off-handedly mentioned once. He said translation of difficult concepts with a highly refined and specialized vocabulary into the vernacular is time consuming and it take a lot of time and ink to explain the concepts themselves that someone who is a specialist can understand by reading one word. He also hinted that if you can’t do the translation you don’t understand the specialized vocabulary either.

It is not impossible though.

[mfbukowski]

13 hours ago, OGHoosier said:

Anyways, I want to discuss this portion of the your highlight if you have time. 

Quote

Third, experience is traditionally seen as tied to the past or as "given"; in its pragmatic mode it is experiential, oriented to changing the given, and thereby having connection with the future as its salient trait. 

This is hard to understand. I read the the traditional view of experience as "experiences are typically regarded as data points which are established in the past and which we reference as we predict and experience the future." With this conception in mind I cannot understand the rest of it, which makes me think my interpretation must be wrong. What does it mean to "change the given" or to have "connection with the future as its salient trait?" I have lived all of my life taking my experience down as "data points", if you will, which I use to create models of the world. How could there be any other way to live?

This last question, of course, is the question of one who has yet to see, as I have yet to do. 

OK well it is very clear to me that this question is the crux of the "problem"- the passage that you do not understand IS exactly what you express not understanding!

The passage of course is the author's way of explaining what you do not yet understand!

Translation: "Experiene is traditionaly seen as tied to the past or as "what is real" and therefore not changable ; in its pragmatic mode is is more about the human experience itself AS EXPERIENCED- it is oriented to changing what is thought of as "real" - and how it could be seen-and thereby having a connection to the future as its most essential trait"

You can't change the past, but you can alter the future by how you understand the past- and create something else from your understanding.

Experiences are not data points to the real, they are your UNDERSTANDING of your experiences and therefore dynamic and changing 

Edited June 24, 2021 by mfbukowski

[mfbukowski]

4 hours ago, The Nehor said:

C.S. Lewis acknowledged the difficulty. This wasn’t something he off-handedly mentioned once. He said translation of difficult concepts with a highly refined and specialized vocabulary into the vernacular is time consuming and it take a lot of time and ink to explain the concepts themselves that someone who is a specialist can understand by reading one word. He also hinted that if you can’t do the translation you don’t understand the specialized vocabulary either.

It is not impossible though.

Well, that's interesting but Lewis was a novelist extremely adept an making up stories abou complex ideas.

I hate novels and never read them.

All I read is philosophy.

That's probably the problem 

[mfbukowski]

19 hours ago, MosiahFree said:

I actually have a request to get the ball rolling. Could you provide us with a definition of experience that matches how you would use it in your philosophical discussions in paragraph format? I do have some conditions to help you focus your thoughts (and my reasons for including them are to follow shortly): (a) Your audience is American highschool students getting ready to graduate, they are literate but completely ignorant of philosophy in the formal sense, (b) No references to books or philosophers, but you can reference culturally relevant media if desired, (c) You can’t ask any questions, even of the rhetorical variety, in the paragraph, (d) You have a hard limit at 500 words and a hard minimum of 50 words, (e) You have as much time as you need to write it.

You have a habit of going about these discussions in a socratic fashion where you often intersperse your answers with open ended questions, as if you are leaving a breadcrumb trail to your bigger point that the other person could follow on their own if so inclined. While I think this is entirely appropriate in some contexts, I think it works against you here on the board. 

This also leads me to bring up that you tend to respond to people in terse sentences and each sentence has an entire line break between them. This creates a psychological tendency in your readers to disconnect each sentence from each other and the thread of your thinking is lost. I’m not suggesting that you stop doing this in all your posts, only that for the purposes of this request you abstain from the habit.

Don’t put too much effort into this either, because whatever it is you write will be insufficient and will undergo multiple revisions as we go on. The benefit of starting with the topic of “experience” is that it is totally universal to all humans and you needn’t work to make it relevant to an audience of Mormons. I want you to feel confident in this definition, you don’t have to rely on any sources other than yourself. You are the one going to be using the word in what is ultimately your philosophical project, you have complete autonomy if defining the word how you want as long as you make it clear to your readers what the parameters are. 

I look forward to reading it.

Thanks- that is the kind of thing I need to hear.

I had written a lot of poetry in one portion of my life, and sometimes of course contemporary poetry makes every line a paragraph to emphasize what is being said.  It's a habit I saw as making things easier to read, not harder.   So I will try not breaking it up that way and see if it yields better fruit in people "getting it" sooner.

Been thinking about describing (not "defining") what experience is- on a high school level.

"Hey dude- what's happening"?

The answer is "experience"!   Heidegger: "Being in the world".   

I see experience as the sum total of what it is to be alive- it is what IS happening now in my life, and my interpretations and memories of everything which has happened, including every sense perception. It is awareness, and my stream of consciousness.   It includes my interpretations of feelings which I have tied to sensations.  It is my awareness of what is happening around me and how I interpret it.  It is what has been called "subjective" a term I do not like because it presupposes an "objective" view- but objectivity is more crowd perception- it is the "they" in "they say ....."   It is my awareness and "stream of consciousness"

Experience as I see it can include intake from speech - what I have heard or read, or undigested, pre-linguistic experience.  Imagine driving a mountain road and suddenly a gorgeous vista appears before us- the only utterance one can make is "Wow"!.   There are no words to explain or share it.

How did I do ?

[OGHoosier]

2 hours ago, mfbukowski said:

OK well it is very clear to me that this question is the crux of the "problem"- the passage that you do not understand IS exactly what you express not understanding!

The passage of course is the author's way of explaining what you do not yet understand!

Translation: "Experiene is traditionaly seen as tied to the past or as "what is real" and therefore not changable ; in its pragmatic mode is is more about the human experience itself AS EXPERIENCED- it is oriented to changing what is thought of as "real" - and how it could be seen-and thereby having a connection to the future as its most essential trait"

You can't change the past, but you can alter the future by how you understand the past- and create something else from your understanding.

Experiences are not data points to the real, they are your UNDERSTANDING of your experiences and therefore dynamic and changing 

Now there's a good translation. That I can understand. In other words, we should consider our past experiences not as discrete events but rather part of a larger experiential whole, and our experience may change how we view those parts relative to the whole?