Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP Posting-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP Path: utzoo!laura From: laura@utzoo.UUCP (Laura Creighton) Newsgroups: net.religion Subject: Re: Logic based on different sets of assumptions (part 2 of 2) Message-ID: <5216@utzoo.UUCP> Date: Tue, 12-Mar-85 14:30:06 EST Article-I.D.: utzoo.5216 Posted: Tue Mar 12 14:30:06 1985 Date-Received: Tue, 12-Mar-85 14:30:06 EST References: <589@pyuxd.UUCP> <4898@cbscc.UUCP> <4899@cbscc.UUCP> <3878@umcp-cs.UUCP>, <649@pyuxd.UUCP> Organization: U of Toronto Zoology Lines: 52 Keywords: Occam, natural flow, objective Exactly. (What? Rosen agreeing with Torek?) Faulty perceptive abilities would have resulted in starvation/failure/death. This depends on how you define ``faulty''. Dogs have survived without colour vision, and we have survived without the hearing range of a dolphin and all of us see optical illusions sometimes. Is this ``faulty''? The more elaborate our perceptive (AND interpretive) systems become, the more the interpretation may be prone to error. Our perceptive abilities, through our senses, would seem to offer us a fair picture of reality. (Will those who deny this please step forward and explain 1) why they feel this way and Ah, I feel this way because I have been working on ways to perceive more and pay attnetion to what I am perceiving for years. I am much better now than I was then, but still, on days like today, I can remember other days when I both perceived more and understood more. Perceptions offer us a picture of reality, yes, but I don't know whether it is ``fair'' or not. It is the only game in town! I would have to know reality itself better to be able to make that sort of a judgement, and this I cannot seem to do without using perceptions. 2) why they're typing a terminal if they don't believe it.) Because it is a useful way of getting done what I want to get done. I still don't know whether it is ``fair'' or not -- it is just the only game in town. Interestingly, your posing this question seems to imply that I have free will -- that I chose to type at a terminal. if you made the same choice, Rich, then do you believe that you have a soul? Or was that question bogus from your point of view? It is only when our more complex brains engage in high-speed analysis (another reason we survived so well) about very complex things (like the nature of the universe), rather than rigorous analysis and acknowledgment that our interpretation may be based on wishful thinking, that we see a problem. What makes you think that rigorous analysis is going to produce any better results than high-speed analysis? What if the problem is in the analysis itself? Also, it is wrong to assume that religious thinkers were not rigorous in their thinking -- in many cases they believed that they had evidence that you would either deny, or explain differently, but misunderstanding evidence is a flaw shared by many rigorous thinkers. Laura Creighton utzoo!laura