Rationality: What it is, why it seems scarce, and why it matters

[Analytics]

4 minutes ago, webbles said:

If Pinker has been able to truly rule out ESP, then why do scientists still study it?

Pinker didn't rule out ESP. The scientists at the Large Hadron Collider did in the 1990's. Sean Carroll (Ph.D. in astrophysics from Harvard, theoretical physicist at Cal Tech) is the one who has done the best job of explaining this to a lay audience.

The vast majority of scientists who understand the details of this politely refrain from rubbing it into anybody's face, and the result is that most people don't understand the actual state of science. This includes scientists who don't understand the details and implications of effective quantum field theory, which includes most psychologists.

The vast majority of cognitive neuroscientists have reached the same conclusions through different avenues of scientific investigation, by the way. 

It reminds me of the difference between a specialist and a generalist. A generalist knows less and less about more and more, until he eventually knows nothing about everything. In contrast, a specialist knows more and more about less and less, until he eventually knows everything about nothing.

Most scientists are specialists, so it isn't surprising that many (most?) of them don't understand the implications of effective quantum field theory and cognitive neuroscience.

 

[ttribe]

1 minute ago, Analytics said:

Pinker didn't rule out ESP. The scientists at the Large Hadron Collider did in the 1990's. Sean Carroll (Ph.D. in astrophysics from Harvard, theoretical physicist at Cal Tech) is the one who has done the best job of explaining this to a lay audience.

The vast majority of scientists who understand the details of this politely refrain from rubbing it into anybody's face, and the result is that most people don't understand the actual state of science. This includes scientists who don't understand the details and implications of effective quantum field theory, which includes most psychologists.

The vast majority of cognitive neuroscientists have reached the same conclusions through different avenues of scientific investigation, by the way. 

It reminds me of the difference between a specialist and a generalist. A generalist knows less and less about more and more, until he eventually knows nothing about everything. In contrast, a specialist knows more and more about less and less, until he eventually knows everything about nothing.

Most scientists are specialists, so it isn't surprising that many (most?) of them don't understand the implications of effective quantum field theory and cognitive neuroscience.

 

This man...after his partnership with Amy Farrah Fowler, of course.

[Analytics]

51 minutes ago, Robert F. Smith said:

It might be well to first try to avoid the Dunning-Kruger effect by ascertaining the actual nature of this question:  Is the question motivated by the silly notion that Genesis is a science or history text?  This is most often the primary source of misunderstanding by both rationalists and religionists, who come to the text without any preparatory context.  People who cannot even distinguish one genre of literature from another are unlikely to get to first base in any discussion of the text.  If, in addition to that, they are unfamiliar with the plethora of other Great Flood stories worldwide, they will likely not have a satisfying or enlightening discussion.

Ironically, this thread is a spinoff of Smac's thread "Saints Unscripted" which is about the specific issue of Bible genres.

 

51 minutes ago, Robert F. Smith said:

Set your sights as high as you are able, you are going to be disappointed.  We muddle through this life, doing the best we can, which will always be less than satisfying to the strict rational mind.  Humans are instinctive and irrational animals.  That will never change.  Sorry . . .

QFT

[Analytics]

22 minutes ago, mfbukowski said:

You know nothing about my life, and  my beliefs.

I know they have something to do with Richard Rorty. Beyond that, you're right. I don't understand you. And that's okay. As Emerson said, to be great is to be misunderstood.

22 minutes ago, mfbukowski said:

The Noah story can be seen as "true" from two different mutually exclusive points of view, held by one person

It could be seen as historical fact AND/OR a useful fable about God saving his people, simultaneously.

Yea, that's Smac's position as well.

22 minutes ago, mfbukowski said:

Wittgenstein makes this point with his rabbit/ duck illusion.

Both of these apparently opposed statements can be simultaneously true

"This is a picture of a duck"

"This is a picture of a rabbit"

Which is true?

Neither. It isn't a duck. It isn't a rabbit. It is an image that can look like a duck or a rabbit based on your point of view.

22 minutes ago, mfbukowski said:

This is about seeing "reality" differently.

We all do.

Yes. But the fact remains that some thoughts are of higher quality than others.

[mfbukowski]

3 hours ago, bluebell said:

How so? 

We cannot step outside of our experiences; they are one of the main ways that we gather evidence which we use to discover truth.  It is impossible to directly observe the world as it is because we can't see it as it is-we see it as our brains interpret it through the filters our brains have developed.  

I've got nothing against Pinker or his tool chest, but it does make me ask, how can we know that the tools that Pinker things are most important, actually are most important? 

Because you've looked at the evidence and from your perspective, post-modern doesn't work.  I have no problem with that, as long as it's understood that that is a belief and not truth.

How can we know, only from the evidence that is left today, that Jesus of Nazareth was a real-world historical figure?  All we have are writings, most from people who also say He was the Son of God.  It's hard to use them as evidence of His existence and at the same time deny the evidence they provide for His divinity as not being believable or reliable.   

Go for it

If you want hundreds of quotes backing you up, google "death of positivism"

These views have been virtually abandoned by nearly ALL philosophers since around the 1960's.

There is no objective evidence that the statement "All truth must be supported by objective evidence" is itself true. !!!

Where is the objective evidence for the statement itself?

It doesn't exist 

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logical_positivism

Edited December 3, 2021 by mfbukowski

[bluebell]

9 minutes ago, mfbukowski said:

Go for it

If you want hundreds of quotes backing you up, google "death of positivism"

These views have been virtually abandoned by nearly ALL philosophers since around the 1960's.

There is no objective evidence that the statement "All truth must be supported by objective evidence" is itself true. !!!

Where is the objective evidence for the statement itself?

It doesn't exist 

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logical_positivism

I was one class short of getting a minor in philosophy (so I know just enough to be dangerous), but the one thing I learned well was that philosophers fought all the time over philosophy, especially when it came to the best way to find truth!

 

[webbles]

18 minutes ago, Analytics said:

Pinker didn't rule out ESP. The scientists at the Large Hadron Collider did in the 1990's. Sean Carroll (Ph.D. in astrophysics from Harvard, theoretical physicist at Cal Tech) is the one who has done the best job of explaining this to a lay audience.

The vast majority of scientists who understand the details of this politely refrain from rubbing it into anybody's face, and the result is that most people don't understand the actual state of science. This includes scientists who don't understand the details and implications of effective quantum field theory, which includes most psychologists.

The vast majority of cognitive neuroscientists have reached the same conclusions through different avenues of scientific investigation, by the way. 

It reminds me of the difference between a specialist and a generalist. A generalist knows less and less about more and more, until he eventually knows nothing about everything. In contrast, a specialist knows more and more about less and less, until he eventually knows everything about nothing.

Most scientists are specialists, so it isn't surprising that many (most?) of them don't understand the implications of effective quantum field theory and cognitive neuroscience.

 

Is this the book "The Big Picture" that explains it to lay audiences?  And he has "absolutely" proven it that ESP, spirits, etc is false?  And it has been known since the 1990s?  That doesn't sound right to me.  I'll see if I can find the book but I don't think it is as certain that you are saying.

[OGHoosier]

36 minutes ago, Analytics said:

Pinker didn't rule out ESP. The scientists at the Large Hadron Collider did in the 1990's. Sean Carroll (Ph.D. in astrophysics from Harvard, theoretical physicist at Cal Tech) is the one who has done the best job of explaining this to a lay audience.

 

You've brought this up in a thread before. If I recall correctly, you didn't answer the contention that Carroll's argument is inconclusive because spirit matter is a localized form of material which would not necessarily be found in the Large Hadron Collider. 

Then again, I suppose my thinking on spirits is a bit idiosyncratic - I don't believe that spirit bodies need to persist while we are mortal so my views on the subject would probably be off-putting to most.

Quote

In all likelihood, sometime in the first or second millennium B.C., a Hebrew storyteller heard about the magnificent architecture in Babylon, so he made up a story about building a tower in Babylon that was integrated with the Mesopotamian stories about a global flood that they inherited. Others liked the story, so it was passed down. That's it. Speculations of real-world history that goes beyond that are simply fanciful.

By what authority do you claim the right to declare what is fanciful and what is not? This is a more important question than it seems at first. Your lodestar is rationality, so explain where your authority to make this judgement comes from. Just "feeling right"/"common sense" or some variation on that theme is an insufficient answer - runs afoul of the problem of induction in a way that disadvantages your claim. 

Regarding Pinker's ethics, he's wrong that his ethics are empirical. They're not, because they inherently depend on subjective assent. He brushes over the main thrust of Hume's critique with nary a spare phrase and jumps right into a crude utilitarianism. His code does not actually rely on right and wrong so much as comparative advantage, which melts away in the face of power imbalances. 

 

[Analytics]

12 minutes ago, webbles said:

Is this the book "The Big Picture" that explains it to lay audiences?  And he has "absolutely" proven it that ESP, spirits, etc is false?  And it has been known since the 1990s?  That doesn't sound right to me.  I'll see if I can find the book but I don't think it is as certain that you are saying.

Yes. To fully understand the argument, you need to read chapters 9 through 27. The real heart of the argument is in chapters 23-24, but you need the prior chapters in the section I quoted to fully understand them.

But he doesn't say "absolutely." In fact he says the opposite. With emphasis added, he says:

Quote

 

We never know anything about the empirical world with absolute certainty. We must always be open to changing our theories in the face of new information.

But we can, in the spirit of the later Wittgenstein, be sufficiently confident in some claims that we treat the matter as effectively settled. It’s possible that at noon tomorrow, the force of gravity will reverse itself, and we’ll all be flung away from the Earth and into space. It’s possible—we can’t actually prove it won’t happen. And if surprising new data or an unexpected theoretical insight forces us to take the possibility seriously, that’s exactly what we should do. But until then, we don’t worry about it.

Psychic powers are like that. There’s no harm in doing careful laboratory tests to search for people with the ability to read minds or push things around through telekinesis. But there’s no real point, since we know such abilities aren’t real, just as we know that gravity won’t reverse tomorrow.

Carroll, Sean. The Big Picture: On the Origins of Life, Meaning, and the Universe Itself (pp. 156-157). Penguin Publishing Group. Kindle Edition. 

 

 

[Hamba Tuhan]

44 minutes ago, mfbukowski said:

If you want hundreds of quotes backing you up, google "death of positivism"

Dogmatically clinging to positivism in the early 21st century feels intellectually dishonest to me, but then it does suit certain agendas.

[Analytics]

1 minute ago, OGHoosier said:

You've brought this up in a thread before. If I recall correctly, you didn't answer the contention that Carroll's argument is inconclusive because spirit matter is a localized form of material which would not necessarily be found in the Large Hadron Collider. 

Yea. Do any Mormons believe that if you crash an electron into a positron in a particle accelerator, the resulting explosion will include creating spirit-matter particles and anti-spirit-matter particles? I doubt it. But if spirit matter were a real thing that could somehow interface with our brain and obeyed the laws of physics as they are currently understood, that is exactly what would happen.

It's as easy to claim spirit matter doesn't obey the known laws of physics as it is to claim that superman can fly around the sky in a way that defies the basic laws of Newtonian physics because that is the nature of his powers. Creating a hypothesis of spirit matter than is plausible, can somehow be integrated into the known laws of physics, and that in principle is testable is a lot harder.

1 minute ago, OGHoosier said:

By what authority do you claim the right to declare what is fanciful and what is not? This is a more important question than it seems at first. Your lodestar is rationality, so explain where your authority to make this judgement comes from. Just "feeling right"/"common sense" or some variation on that theme is an insufficient answer - runs afoul of the problem of induction in a way that disadvantages your claim. 

It isn't about authority. It's about accepting the laws of physics, knowing what is possible and what isn't possible, and making reasonable inferences about the kind of thing that would result in the stories that we've received.

1 minute ago, OGHoosier said:

Regarding Pinker's ethics, he's wrong that his ethics are empirical. They're not, because they inherently depend on subjective assent. He brushes over the main thrust of Hume's critique with nary a spare phrase and jumps right into a crude utilitarianism. His code does not actually rely on right and wrong so much as comparative advantage, which melts away in the face of power imbalances. 

I don't think you understand his point. 

[Analytics]

3 minutes ago, Hamba Tuhan said:

Dogmatically clinging to positivism in the early 21st century feels intellectually dishonest to me, but then it does suit certain agendas.

The book Enlightenment Now does an outstanding job of explaining how the world is a much better place now than it was even a few decades ago, let alone centuries, and that reason, science, and humanism deserve the credit. He successfully defends science from accusations of determinism, reductionism, essentialism, positivism, "and worst of all, a crime called scientism." 

It isn't about dogmatically clinging to a philosophy that has been discredited. It's about recognizing "the disaster of postmodernism, with its defiant obscurantism, self-refuting relativism, and suffocating political correctness. Many of its luminaries—Nietzsche, Heidegger, Foucault, Lacan, Derrida, the Critical Theorists—are morose cultural pessimists who declare that modernity is odious, all statements are paradoxical, works of art are tools of oppression, liberal democracy is the same as fascism, and Western civilization is circling the drain."

Pinker convincingly makes the case that "science is indispensable in all areas of human concern, including politics, the arts, and the search for meaning, purpose, and morality."

As a side note, right above the title of the book are the words:

"MY NEW FAVORITE BOOK OF ALL TIME." —BILL GATES

Maybe that review means something to you. Maybe it doesn't. Regardless, this is a serious book that ought to be taken seriously. 

[OGHoosier]

6 minutes ago, Analytics said:

Do any Mormons believe that if you crash an electron into a positron in a particle accelerator, the resulting explosion will include creating spirit-matter particles and anti-spirit-matter particles? I doubt it. But if spirit matter were a real thing that could somehow interface with our brain and obeyed the laws of physics as they are currently understood, that is exactly what would happen.

Why is that exactly what would happen? Please answer without begging the question. 

6 minutes ago, Analytics said:

Creating a hypothesis of spirit matter than is plausible, can somehow be integrated into the known laws of physics, and that in principle is testable is a lot harder.

It is a fine thing, then, that I am under no obligation to do that. 

6 minutes ago, Analytics said:

It isn't about authority. It's about accepting the laws of physics, knowing what is possible and what isn't possible, and making reasonable inferences about the kind of thing that would result in the stories that we've received.

You offered a historical interpretation and summarily declared anything beyond your interpretation to be fanciful. "Some Hebrew heard about a building in Babylon, wrote about it, people liked it and passed it down and that is all that happened" - and for your defense you invoke the laws of physics?  Invoke them against a literalist reading of the Tower of Babel narrative, sure - but to declare that your historical narrative is validated and all others vitiated by the laws of physics?

Never mind that you still haven't dealt with the problem of induction - what makes your stated claims "reasonable" besides your own intuition, and how can you deal with contradictory intuitions? Despite your protests to the contrary, it is really difficult to get any meaning beyond "Analytics-like" out of the word "reasonable" when you use it. 

[Hamba Tuhan]

13 minutes ago, Analytics said:

It's about recognizing "the disaster of postmodernism, with its defiant obscurantism, self-refuting relativism, and suffocating political correctness. Many of its luminaries—Nietzsche, Heidegger, Foucault, Lacan, Derrida, the Critical Theorists—are morose cultural pessimists who declare that modernity is odious, all statements are paradoxical, works of art are tools of oppression, liberal democracy is the same as fascism, and Western civilization is circling the drain."

I fully reject this all-or-nothing approach.

[Analytics]

4 minutes ago, OGHoosier said:

Why is that exactly what would happen? Please answer without begging the question. 

Thanks for asking.

In the words of Sean Carroll,

Quote

 

The reason why we know there are no new fields or particles that play an important role in the physics underlying our everyday lives is a crucial property of quantum field theory known as crossing symmetry. This amazing feature helps us be sure that certain kinds of particles do not exist; otherwise we would have found them already. Crossing symmetry basically says that if one field can interact with another one (for example, by scattering off of it), then the second field can create particles of the first one under the right conditions. It can be thought of as the quantum-field-theory analogue of the principle that every action implies a reaction.

Consider a new particle X that you might suspect leads to subtle but important physical effects in the everyday world, whether it’s the ability to bend spoons with your mind or consciousness itself. That means that the X particle must interact with ordinary particles like quarks and electrons, either directly or indirectly. If it didn’t, there would be no way for it to have any effect on the world we directly see. [Note that X has the exact properties that "spirit matter" must have in order to somehow interact with the electrical circuits of our brain.]

Interactions between particles in quantum field theory can be visualized by the lovely mechanism of Feynman diagrams. Think of an X particle bouncing off of an electron by the exchange of some other new particle, Y. From left to right in the diagram, an X and an electron came in, exchanged a Y particle, then went off on their own ways.

The diagram isn’t just a picture of what can happen; it’s associated with a number, which tells us how strong the interaction is—in this case, how likely an X is to scatter off an electron. Crossing symmetry says that for every such process, there is another process of the same strength, obtained by rotating the diagram by ninety degrees, and switching any lines that changed directions from particle to antiparticles. One result of crossing symmetry is shown in the next figure.

In field theory, every particle has an antiparticle with the opposite electric charge. The antiparticle of an electron is a particle called the positron, which is positively charged. Crossing symmetry says that the first process, scattering of an X off an electron, implies the existence of a related process in which an electron and positron annihilate to create one of our X particles as well as its antiparticle.

Here is the payoff. We have smashed electrons and positrons together, often and with great care. From 1989 to 2000, a particle accelerator called the Large Electron-Positron Collider (predecessor of today’s Large Hadron Collider) operated underground outside Geneva. Within its experiments, electrons and positrons collided at enormous energies, and physicists kept extremely careful track of everything that came out. They were hoping with all their hearts to find new particles; discovering new particles, especially unexpected ones, is what keeps particle physics exciting. But they didn’t see any. Just the known particles of the Core Theory, produced in great numbers.

The same has been done for protons smashing into antiprotons, and various other combinations. The verdict is unambiguous: we’ve found all of the particles that our best current technology enables us to find. Crossing symmetry assures us that, if there were any particles lurking around us that interact with ordinary matter strongly enough to make a difference to the behavior of everyday stuff, those particles should have easily been produced in experiments. But there’s nothing there.

There are probably more particles yet to be found. They just won’t be relevant to our everyday world. The fact that we haven’t yet found such particles tells us a great deal about what properties they must have; that’s the power of quantum field theory. Any particle that we haven’t yet detected must have one of the following features:

1. It could be so very weakly interacting with ordinary matter that it is almost never produced; or—
2. It could be extremely massive, so that it takes collisions at energies even higher than what our best accelerators can achieve in order to make it; or—
3. It could be extremely short-lived, so that it gets made but then almost immediately decays away into other particles.

If any particle we haven’t yet found lasted long enough and interacted with ordinary matter with sufficient strength that it could possibly affect the physics of everyday goings-on, we would have produced it in experiments by now.

One as-yet-undiscovered particle we believe exists is dark matter. Astronomers, studying the motions of stars and galaxies as well as the large-scale structure of the universe, have become convinced that most matter is “dark”—some kind of new particle that is not part of the Core Theory. The dark-matter particle must be quite long-lived, or it would have decayed away long ago. But it cannot interact strongly with ordinary matter, or it would have already been found in one of the many dark-matter detection experiments that physicists are currently running. Whatever the dark matter is, it certainly plays no role in determining the weather here on Earth, or anything having to do with biology, consciousness, or human life.

Carroll, Sean. The Big Picture: On the Origins of Life, Meaning, and the Universe Itself (p. 180-183). Penguin Publishing Group. Kindle Edition. 

 

 

4 minutes ago, OGHoosier said:

It is a fine thing, then, that I am under no obligation to do that. 

You offered a historical interpretation and summarily declared anything beyond your interpretation to be fanciful. "Some Hebrew heard about a building in Babylon, wrote about it, people liked it and passed it down and that is all that happened" - and for your defense you invoke the laws of physics?  Invoke them against a literalist reading of the Tower of Babel narrative, sure - but to declare that your historical narrative is validated and all others vitiated by the laws of physics?

All I said was that "Speculations of real-world history that goes beyond that are simply fanciful." 

That's simply my best crack at making a historical inference about the origins of the story. If you disagree and can think of a counterexample of a non-fanciful historical inference that does goes beyond what I said, I'd be very interested in hearing it. The fact that you didn't provide that counterexample and instead used this as an opportunity to disparage me is straight out of @smac97's playbook.

[SeekingUnderstanding]

56 minutes ago, Hamba Tuhan said:

 

Edit - oops. I really should know better than putting my nose in a philosophical debate…

Edited December 3, 2021 by SeekingUnderstanding

[mfbukowski]

32 minutes ago, Hamba Tuhan said:

Dogmatically clinging to positivism in the early 21st century feels intellectually dishonest to me, but then it does suit certain agendas.

It does, and the best part is that today,  religionists actually have the upper hand in showing how "testimonies" in religious and moral contexts are justifiable.

How does one show that the belief that "murder is wrong" is justified in positivism?

Not possible.

On the other hand, in contexts like morals, where objective evidence is impossible, feelings can justify beliefs

How does one prove that "all people are created equal" when objective evidence if anything, opposes that?

We inherently, it seems, OUGHT to believe that. 

Our entire Constitution is based on assumptions which are stated to be "self evident". Are those "true"? Where is the evidence? 

We are on the winning side in these times, but it seems no religionists see it yet.

 

[Calm]

1 hour ago, Analytics said:

as they are currently understood

That pretty much says it all, IMO.  
 

If they are misunderstood….

Edited December 3, 2021 by Calm

[webbles]

1 hour ago, Analytics said:

Yes. To fully understand the argument, you need to read chapters 9 through 27. The real heart of the argument is in chapters 23-24, but you need the prior chapters in the section I quoted to fully understand them.

But he doesn't say "absolutely." In fact he says the opposite. With emphasis added, he says:

 

Wait, so he doesn't disprove them?  Then I'm confused on why you are bringing him up.  I've put a hold on the book since it will probably be very interesting.

[mfbukowski]

It's idiotic to say that the world is not better for the paradigms of science.

NO ONE DEBATES THAT

That is not even relevant to how religious statements are justified.

Statements like that just make me shudder.

[Analytics]

17 minutes ago, webbles said:

Wait, so he doesn't disprove them?  Then I'm confused on why you are bringing him up.  I've put a hold on the book since it will probably be very interesting.

In an absolute sense, science never disproves anything. Full stop.

But in a practical sense, since is about as confident that spirits aren't real as it is about anything.

Carroll's statement is bold and confident, but does have some explicit qualifications. You'll enjoy the book, I think.

[OGHoosier]

1 hour ago, Analytics said:

Thanks for asking.

In the words of Sean Carroll,

 

All I said was that "Speculations of real-world history that goes beyond that are simply fanciful." 

That's simply my best crack at making a historical inference about the origins of the story. If you disagree and can think of a counterexample of a non-fanciful historical inference that does goes beyond what I said, I'd be very interested in hearing it. The fact that you didn't provide that counterexample and instead used this as an opportunity to disparage me is straight out of @smac97's playbook.

Let me see if I have this right. We can smash electrons and positrons together, they create particles, and we can see the type of particles they create. It seems to me, however, that there is a serious logical leap between that and confidently being able to assert that we have by that process produced all the potential particles that can affect the material world. This is especially the case if spirit matter is restricted to specific localities (as we have reason to believe it is), or interacts immaterially on some variety of panpsychist approach (which I believe is scripturally mandated anyway due to the verbal and semantically-loaded nature of Jesus' commands to the Sea of Galilee, the bodies of those He healed, the fig tree, etc.)...not to mention the possibility that spirit matter may simply be a different configuration of Core Theory particles. Again, I think the claim that Carroll has vitiated any claims to belief in spirits or spiritual phenomena goes beyond his evidence.

As for the history discussion.

You demanded a non-fanciful example, which action highlights my point - how can you defend your judgement on what is "fanciful" or not without resorting to your intuition on the matter? I say that you use "reasonable" in a fashion that makes it equivalent to "Analytics-like" because, in making demands like this, you have given yourself the role of judge on what is reasonable and what is not! What you have effectively done here is demand that I satisfy you, and only then will you grant the title "reasonable" to whatever I say. You keep using the words "reasonable", "rational", etc., but who is to define what is reasonable or not if it is not self-evident, ie people disagree? Your school of thought relies on there being some canonical capacity called "reason" that guides anybody who uses it into truth, and therefore all disagreement must be the result of "irrationality." This does not answer the fundamental question - since both parties believe they are being rational, who gets to decide which of their "rationalities" is actually rational?  Even if you are right, reliance on "reason" is little more than a crabshoot in such circumstances. What you would need is the existence of some outside rationality-arbiter to impose a judgement - but even then, that rationality-arbiter would merely be a third interlocuter. 

Put another way, for the sake of argument let's concede that there is a Platonic ideal of "reason" that, if followed, would lead one into truth. There is a "correct rationality." It still doesn't matter if that "correct rationality' is not operationalized, is not agreed upon by the interlocuters. Such a "correct rationality" would rely on self-evidence in order to justify itself, but if it is not self-evident to someone, then there goes its authority and the whole thing devolves into a back and forth of "I'm right and you're wrong." Why should your description of rationality have any purchase on us if we disagree with it? 

Returning to your school of thought - in practice, what this all means is that your worldview rules out the possibility that your opponents are rational so long as you are unpersuaded. Let us put aside the hypotheticals about "I acknowledge the possibility that I could be wrong" - in practice that is meaningless. As long as you believe you are right, the only explanation is that we are irrational. So you deny us rationality, as you have done. Yet we have not been persuaded that we are being irrational. This is all kicking against the pricks. 

[Analytics]

...as they are currently understood...

40 minutes ago, Calm said:

That pretty much says it all, IMO.  

If they are misunderstood….

Of course. But how robust the relevant laws of physics are understood needs to be appreciated.

Hanging your hat on this reminds of that scene from Dumb and Dumber when Lloyd asks Mary Swanson, "what are the chances of a guy like you and a girl like me ending up together?" Mary replies, "not good." Lloyd: "Not good like one in a hundred?" Mary: "I'd say more like one in a million."

Upon hearing that, Lloyd gets ecstatically optimistic. "So you're telling me there's a chance!"  

[Hamba Tuhan]

22 minutes ago, mfbukowski said:

It's idiotic to say that the world is not better for the paradigms of science.

NO ONE DEBATES THAT

Yep, it's a strained binary for the sake of forcing a rhetorical outcome.

[Analytics]

10 minutes ago, OGHoosier said:

Let me see if I have this right. We can smash electrons and positrons together, they create particles, and we can see the type of particles they create. It seems to me, however, that there is a serious logical leap between that and confidently being able to assert that we have by that process produced all the potential particles that can affect the material world.

It isn't a "logical leap." It's about the specific mathematical formulation of effective quantum field theory and the exhaustively robust body of laboratory evidence that these formulas accurately describe reality within their domain of applicability. 

10 minutes ago, OGHoosier said:

This is especially the case if spirit matter is restricted to specific localities (as we have reason to believe it is), or interacts immaterially on some variety of panpsychist approach (which I believe is scripturally mandated anyway due to the verbal and semantically-loaded nature of Jesus' commands to the Sea of Galilee, the bodies of those He healed, the fig tree, etc.)...not to mention the possibility that spirit matter may simply be a different configuration of Core Theory particles. Again, I think the claim that Carroll has vitiated any claims to belief in spirits or spiritual phenomena goes beyond his evidence.

The problem with your simplistic evaluation here is that if "spirit matter is restricted to specific localities" in the way you claim, then according to quantum field theory, it is incapable of interfacing with the human brain in any way. Of course effective quantum field theory could be wrong, but literally all of the laboratory evidence indicates it is not.

It's like an aerospace engineer arguing with a child about whether its possible for superman to fly. The engineer explains to the child that its impossible for superman to fly because the way superman flies has no thrust, no aerodynamic lift, and contradicts everything we know about gravity, Newton's laws of motions, aerodynamics, etc. The child then dismisses the engineer by saying, "Your claim goes beyond the evidence. Superman doesn't fly by using the laws of aerodynamics. He flies using his superpowers!"

That makes sense in theory. But it seems that in this case, the burden of proof is on the kid claiming that these superpowers are a real-world thing.

10 minutes ago, OGHoosier said:

As for the history discussion.

You demanded a non-fanciful example, which action highlights my point - how can you defend your judgement on what is "fanciful" or not without resorting to your intuition on the matter?

Whether or not an idea is "fanciful" depends upon whether or not an idea is plausible and whether or not there are good reasons to believe it. I suggest you read the book Rationality: What it is, why it seems scarce, and why it matters by Steven Pinker to better understand these issues.

10 minutes ago, OGHoosier said:

Returning to your school of thought - in practice, what this all means is that your worldview rules out the possibility that your opponents are rational so long as you are unpersuaded.

It isn't about whether or not my "opponents" are rational. Its about the quality of the arguments employed in the debate. 

10 minutes ago, OGHoosier said:

Let us put aside the hypotheticals about "I acknowledge the possibility that I could be wrong" - in practice that is meaningless. As long as you believe you are right, the only explanation is that we are irrational. So you deny us rationality, as you have done.

It has nothing to do with me believing I'm right and believing you are wrong. If you consulted a tarot card reader and thereby concluded that you agreed to me about the provenance of the Tower of Babel story I would still call you irrational. Whether or not you are rational depends upon whether you ascribe to the normative methodologies of rationality. It doesn't depend on whether or not we agree.

10 minutes ago, OGHoosier said:

This is all kicking against the pricks. 

I couldn't agree more.