Objectivity about physical things

I said previously:

“When I think of objectivity, I think of ... The dictionary sense - “of, relating to, or being an object, phenomenon, or condition in the realm of sensible experience independent of individual thought and perceptible by all observers“ ... It's real for you, me and the next person, and is not subject to different interpretations.”

... But I let my mouth out-pace my mind. Upon further review, there's a better dictionary definition right there on the same page :

3a : expressing or dealing with facts or conditions as perceived without distortion by personal feelings, prejudices, or interpretations <objective art> <an objective history of the war> <an objective judgment>

I think THAT is a more accurate description of what I think about the adjective "objective".

Still, when we talk about a "fact or condition", there are some aspects of that fact or condition that we have to be very careful about while claiming to be objective about it.

Philosopher Daniel Dennett speaks of physical, design and intentional stances as the levels of abstraction at which we view the properties and behaviors of a thing.

Wikipedia sez:

"when explaining and predicting the behavior of an object, we can choose to view it at varying levels of abstraction. The more concrete the level, the more accurate in principle our predictions are."

Notice that this refers to a real entity, not a conceptual one.

This indicates that claims made about physical attributes such as height, width, depth, weight, color and composition, for instance, can be made accurately and repeated by all potential observers accurately, and are subject to little or no misinterpretation of the meaning and value of the attributes used to describe it. It really is just a description of what the thing is, without imbuing it with deeper meaning. It doesn't require judgement to apprehend these values because those values will be the same no matter who measures them.

We can describe what the universe is, when we stick to these physical attributes.

What we don't have to do, if we exercise some self-control, is make further claims about what those values were prior to today, or what they will be after today, nor what they mean. I might bring those aspects up later, but it's not central to my train of thought in this post.

All of this is to say that we can describe our world as it is here and now, and be correct about it. Taken one moment at a time, we can probably claim to be objective about the physical description of the world, to within a reasonable doubt.

When we start looking at meaning and purpose is where the fun really starts. I'll give THAT a go next time.

Handy reference: Evidence for atheism

I don't generally care to think about organized arguments for non-belief because I don't think non-belief bears a burden of proof, but David Neff's Argument for Atheism at Infidels is a keeper!

Concise. Organized.

Enjoy!

Proselytizing

Ed Brayton at Dispatches from the Culture Wars relates a Ray Comfort proselytizing story worth having a giggle at.

It reminds me of the ever-diminishing stream of proselytizers that have accosted me on the street or at my door over the years. The most memorable - and scary - was when I was 17 and mowing my Dad's front lawn. Two old, I mean OLD men in black suits and armed with bibles stopped me in mid-mow. That's a gardening term - "mid-mow". They asked me if I thought it would be wonderful when the lion lies down with the lamb, yada, blah, yada. I was weirded out. I think my dad looked out the window, called me inside as if he had another chore for me, and rescued my shiftless ass.

Fast forward twenty years. I'm pretty hard boiled about it now. People attempting to witness to me at the front door get a curt "No thanks - 'preciate it!" from me before I firmly close the door. Not quite a slam - a firm closing.

I just really don't care what people think about their religion.

I don't care if people are concerned about my "soul", although, if they'd expressed concern about my soles, I might be interested.

It would be fun to converse with Ray Comfort, though. When he gets to his "do you think you're a good person" shtick, I'd answer with an unequivocal "no" and proceed with a totally fabricated rap about how I like to use Black & Decker power tools on people to see whether they find it pleasurable or painful, and how I like Black & Decker better than Stanley or Craftsman, and why. I could have a lot of fun with that!

Objectivity

Five weeks ago, I resumed musing about the term "objective moral values", especially as they are used as an argument for the existence of God. The weeks go by, my focus fuzzes and then sharpens, and we are here.

My problem with the term "objective" is that it assumes there is some way of stepping outside your subjective self to see or experience the thing you are considering to be objective. This is always a problem.

When I think of objectivity, I think of entities, behaviors or events that are verifiably the same for all people. The dictionary sense - “of, relating to, or being an object, phenomenon, or condition in the realm of sensible experience independent of individual thought and perceptible by all observers“ - is what I'm referring to. It's real for you, me and the next person, and is not subject to different interpretations. Seems like a good definition.

Taking objects, for example, if I have a party, and twenty people come over, we can all observe that my coffee table is in my family room. It is objectively there, in spite of any claims otherwise. Anyone that ignores the simple fact of my coffee table being in my family room could end up with bloody shins if they think they can navigate through a crowd of 20 in the family room containing the coffee table. When someone makes a claim like "my coffee table is in my family room", anyone can verify that the claim is true. We can say that we have identified an objective fact.

Now this objective fact will remain a fact for only a limited time. As long as I want the table in the family room, or as long as I own the house (and want the table in the family room), or as long as someone else wants to maintain the table in the family room after I die, it is a fact, but not forever. For a long time, in human terms, the coffee table being in my family room will be a fact, but the world will change, and someday vanish as a recognizable entity. So, there are limits on what we can consider an objective fact when discussing objects and their existence. The status of their existence, or their relationship to other objects in existence, change over time. In this sense, objectivity is limited to some period of time. We can be objective about my coffee table in my family room from the time both are in existence and the table is within the boundaries of the room, but not before and after.

So ... What is objective again?

(to be continued)

Something versus Nothing

Somewhere, I thought that I had made the statement that the answer to the question "Why is there something rather than nothing" was "because there are more ways for something to exist". An example would be that the number of elementary particles in the universe could be more than they are in our universe, or less, or configured differently, etc. But I can't find the actual post. Regardless, Richard Carrier makes the same case in more detail at his FTB blog from March 2011 - somehow I missed this.

Scroll to the section "Getting Everything from Nothing".

Bookmark.

Enjoy!

I'm a Skeptic

I've been toying around with writing a few paragraphs on what I believe - a position paper on life, if you will. While procrastinating on this, I ran across Brent Rasmussen's post on Vox Day's e-Book "The Irrational Atheist". It's about 4 & 1/2 years old, so it's not breaking news, but it's mildly interesting. My main impression was his mini-rant at the beginning, having nothing to do with the book review. He strongly criticized the "atheist movement" as

... a big, fat exercise in futility. Atheists are not, in any way, shape, or form, a "group" in the same sense that Methodists, Shriners, or Republicans are a group.

He went on to describe his atheism as just a single feature of his overall world view - a description that I think most non-believers would agree fits them as well.

In trying to describe myself, the word "atheist" absolutely describes me. But that's just an outcome of my more general skepticism. I'm going through life trying to fine-tune my scam filter, and I stop every so often to look at what that filter screened out. I'm having a good time doing it.

Final Reflections

Some final thought on presuppositionalism and the Pastor Stephen Feinstein - Russell Glasser debate.

First, I wasn’t trying to be intelleckshul or address the pastor’s points by raising objections or refutations - Russell’s original responses were all that was necessary. I was just trying to become familiar with the general concepts, and actual implementation of presuppositional apologetics. It was the pursuit of a personal interest. Reading a proponent’s actual words seemed to be the most direct way of doing this, and Feinstein was the most convenient example at the time. That I spent way too much time on this is the result of several things. Mostly, I was morbidly obsessed with the super-slow-mo train wreck that was Pastor Stephen. He fretted and strutted upon the stage for two rounds, then, when pressed by Russell to start making an argument, sprang into a manic blaze of volubility and circumlocution. He set two contentions for himself: “atheism is untenable, irrational, and ultimately impossible" and "the Christian worldview is the only worldview that is possible given the preconditions of intelligibility“, and he didn’t make a case for either. Along the way, he claimed loudly and often that he was winning, that Russell was ducking the issues or smuggling in assertions or using smoke and mirrors, and that logic savages the “atheist position”. Never mind that outside the belief that there is no god, there is no such thing as an “atheist position”.

Secondly, I’m interested in stuff - and presupp qualifies as stuff. I usually think that I can figure stuff out, so the pastor’s opaque writing represented a challenge. I presumed there was something redeeming in the pastor’s words, but, sadly, I’ll admit that I didn’t find it.

Regarding Stephen’s first contention, he appeared to speak many of the words that could be used to make an argument that “some world view is impossible”, but he chose an atheist worldview as the target. Since such a world view exists only in the minds of presuppositionalists, further development of this contention was irrelevant. So most of his lengthy, circuitous, opaque rhetoric was wasted.

Stephen’s second contention was that the “Christian worldview is the only worldview that is possible given the preconditions of intelligibility”. Here again, it’s based on a presupposition that god exists. Stephen and Russell argued back and forth about this, with the pastor claiming that god is necessary, and Russell claiming that it’s a needless insertion. The pastor backed up his claim that god is necessary with a claim that “a necessary being is necessarily necessary!“ - thus sending me into fits of laughter. That’s the single most memorable quote of this whole debate.

Rounds four and five didn’t produce any new argument from the pastor - although he threw out the word “deduction” several times. Again, he follows a pattern of putting vaguely relevant words in proximity to each other, and calls it an argument. I can't say that anything meaningful registered. Yes, yes, the presuppositional argument has gone over my head. I get it.

The pastor wrote a sixth, post-debate “Final Reflections” piece, which I read before the end of last year, but I won’t mention it further here, other than to steal its title for this post. His post struck me as a display of poor sportsmanship at best. I don’t recall it clarifying what the pastor had already spent 20,000 words trying to say.

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When Russell invoked a five round limit in round three, it raised the idea that some debate rules should have been agreed to and published before the debate started. The Carrier-O’Connell on-line debate might me used as a example. That debate contained a Joint Statement that described what each party was asserting, and a set of rules that would be followed once the debate commenced:

1. There were four rounds: an opening statement defending their respective sides of the debated proposition, one rebuttal, one counter-rebuttal, then a closing statement.


2. For each round, both participants submittals would be published simultaneously.


3. There was a two week maximum duration between rounds.


4. There was a 3000 word limit per submittal.


5. There were to be no ad-hominem attacks.


6. They agreed to a moderator and four judges.


7. They agreed to adhere to the rulings of the moderator while the debate is in progress.


8. They agreed to a scoring system.

I think that some or all of the Carrier-O’Connell rules would have resulted in a far cleaner, more enjoyable debate here.

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What did I learn from Feinstein-Glasser?

I learned that presupp is based on bare assertion. It assumes a god. You don’t get to question that, because God is “necessary”. In the pastor’s particular implementation of the argument, the overarching goal was to paint a conjectural “atheist world view” as unintelligible, while presenting a Christian world view as intelligible. In neither case was it successful, as both contentions are based on fallacious arguments (a straw man, and the afore-mentioned bare assertion). The pastor wasted about 20,000 words on this endeavor.

In conclusion, I learned that a presupposition of any substantial scope should probably be rejected outright. Presupposing a god is of a scope of the greatest magnitude possible, and requires subjecting it to the greatest skepticism possible.

Whew! Glad that's over!