yguy

If the truth of the syllogism depends on the conclusion following from the premises, it is not tautological.

It's not inconceivable, any more that it is inconceivable that there exists a mathematical model within which 1+1=3.

If it's a moral decision, it cannot be a matter of personal preference.

We need to separate various forms of infatuation from objective discernment. Kittens are cute because of the feelings they evoke, not because of what they are, and people are cool only to the degree to which others think they are. OTOH, there is a reason Tolstoy, Hugo, Dickens and the like are remembered while other writers of their era are not. Personally, I find Dickens unreadable, but when I listen to his works on tape, I know he wasn't lauded for nothing.

No.

God doesn't obey any laws whatsoever. That said, your statement is true, even if the conclusion is false. To decide that the premise is true, and that therefore the conclusion is true, would be tantamount to making it true by means of the logical process, as I see it.

yguy

Aww, lighten up, grumpy - I'm just teasing.

AdamWho

If you actually believe this statement why bother to even post in (or rather hi-jack) a thread like this one?
If your belief is predicated on "god being beyond or immune to physical laws" then there cannot be any meaningful discussion.

A religionist and a physicist have vastly different epistemological bases they are operating from; they might as well be speaking a foreign language to each other.

Jesse

yguy:
If the truth of the syllogism depends on the conclusion following from the premises, it is not tautological.

A tautology is any statement which cannot logically be false. If the conclusion of a syllogism follows logically from the premises, and if you state it as "if premise x, y are true then z is true", then it is a tautology, as I understand it.


yguy:
Is a Palamino prettier than an Appaloosa? At that point it's a matter of perference; but a swaybacked, bedraggled looking horse of any breed is physically ugly.

Jesse:
To all humans that may be true, but that just shows that all humans have a broadly similar set of aesthetic preferences. Is it totally inconceivable to you that another species--perhaps even an alien species--could have aesthetic preferences so different than ours that even when virtually all humans agree that one of two animals is uglier than the other, virtually all members of this species might have the opposite preference?

yguy:
It's not inconceivable, any more that it is inconceivable that there exists a mathematical model within which 1+1=3.

Non sequitor. By adopting another mathematical model you'd change the meaning of the terms--I'm asking whether, even if the terms "ugly", "beautiful", etc. mean the same thing, an animal that all humans found ugly could be beautiful to another species. In other words, are our identifications of what is "beautiful" really objective, or do they just depend on personal tastes (perhaps genetically-influenced personal tastes that will be the same for all humans).

Most humans would probably find an attractive woman more beautiful than a female chimp, but most male chimps would probably feel the opposite way. Are male chimps objectively wrong while humans are objectively right about who's more beautiful?

Jesse:
It also seems odd to me you could say there is an "objective truth" about whether a swaybacked, bedraggled horse is uglier than a purebred, but no objective truth about whether a Palamino is uglier than an Appaloosa. Isn't that like saying that for some moral decisions, there is an objectively right choice and an objectively wrong one, but for other moral decisions it's just a matter of personal preference?

yguy:
If it's a moral decision, it cannot be a matter of personal preference.

So all moral decisions have objective right answers, while some aesthetic decisions have objective right answers (Molly Yard vs. Nicole Kidman) while other aesthetic decisions are just a matter of personal taste (Nicole Kidman vs. Catherine Zeta-Jones)? Where do you draw the line? More importantly, how do you know this? How would the world be different if all aesthetic differences were totally objective, or if all aesthetic differences were a matter of personal taste?

Also, even if you would say something doesn't deserve to be called a "moral" decision if it has no objective right answer, is it possible that some of the decisions we think are moral issues and have strong opinions on are actually just a matter of personal preference?

yguy:
They are objectively wrong. The fact that there are people who think ugly is beautiful doesn't make ugly beautiful.

Jesse:
But how do you know that "ugly" and "beautiful" are traits that there is an objective truth about in the first place? I mean, are you a total platonist who believes that every adjective we use points to some "objective truth" in this sense? Are some people objectively cooler than others? Are some foods objectively yummier than others? Are some baby animals objectively cuter than others? Are some books objectively more boring than others?

yguy:
We need to separate various forms of infatuation from objective discernment. Kittens are cute because of the feelings they evoke, not because of what they are, and people are cool only to the degree to which others think they are. OTOH, there is a reason Tolstoy, Hugo, Dickens and the like are remembered while other writers of their era are not. Personally, I find Dickens unreadable, but when I listen to his works on tape, I know he wasn't lauded for nothing.

So kittens are not "objectively" cuter than bullfrogs, but Dickens is "objectively" a better writer than, say, Michael Crichton? Again, how do you know when something is "objective discernment" and when something is just a matter of subjective feelings invoked in you? Call me crazy, but people's preference for Nicole Kidman over Molly Yard sounds a lot more like "infatuation" than "objective discernment" to me. Just as humans are in some sense wired to all find kittens cuter than frogs, the same would seem to be true of the kinds of faces and bodies they find attractive.

Jesse:
Tell me, since you seem to believe there is an objective truth about whether it is or is not in God's power to do something, what would be wrong with identifying this with the necessary/contingent distinction like so:

truth about our reality which it would have been within God's power to make false (for example, 'the earth is round') = contingent truth

truth about our reality which it would not have been within God's power to make false (perhaps '1+1=2') = necessary truth

Does observing whether a fact is true in reality tell us anything, in itself, about whether it would have been within God's power to make it false?

yguy:
No.

Well then, that's exactly what I meant when I said that knowing whether a fact is true or false in reality tells you nothing, in itself about whether it's necessary or contingent.

Jesse:
If we can use our own logical reasoning to deduce that, if God obeys the laws of logic, he cannot have made a statement like 1+1=2 false, does that mean we made it true by means of the logical process?

yguy:
God doesn't obey any laws whatsoever.

You said earlier you thought it possible that God is incapable of making 1+1=3, or of making a proposition both true and false. If so, a shorthand way of referring to this would be that "God obeys the laws of logic/math". Maybe you don't like that language and would describe the situation in some other way, but it doesn't really matter--I could just say "God cannot do anything which is inconsistent with the laws of logic" and it'd mean the same thing.

yguy:
That said, your statement is true, even if the conclusion is false. To decide that the premise is true, and that therefore the conclusion is true, would be tantamount to making it true by means of the logical process, as I see it.

I don't know what you're referring to here when you say "the statement", "the premise", and "the conclusion". Here, I'll restate it:

premise 1: It is not within God's power to do anything which contradicts the laws of logic"

premise 2: "making a proposition simultaneously true and false would contradict the laws of logic"

conclusion: So, God cannot make a proposition true and false, and "a proposition cannot be both true and false" is a necessary truth.

Which part of this do you disagree with? Am I making "a proposition cannot be both true and false" true by means of the logical process (I don't understand what you mean by that phrase, but maybe your answer will clarify things).

yguy

Again, by that definition, "If a cylinder has a base with area A, and it has height H, then its volume is A*H" is a tautology. By extension, it would seem that all valid syllogisms are as well, but that invalid ones are not. I don't see how any syllogism could fit the definition given earlier.

That last part about genetics I could go for.

I don't find any meaning in the question. It's a bit like asking if infants could make a reasonable decision about what adults should eat, in my mind.

Why you draw the line has to come first. If you draw it because of what your ego wants, you can't be objective.

If we drew such distinctions on an objective rather than an egotistical basis, we'd have Heaven on Earth, I believe.

Of course. How do we know which it is? If we're selfish, we won't want to; otherwise we know intuitively.

I don't know about that. Personally, I'd put Frank Herbert in a league with Dickens or the rest of them. However, any we've mentioned so far is obviously better than the writers of romance novels, for instance.

It could be either. The trick is, when we look at somebody attractive, the tendency is to see what they can do for our ego rather than the actual person. If you look at Nicole and get aroused, you love her for the way she makes you feel; if she then pulls off her Nicole mask revealing Molly Yard, you'll find her repulsive for the same reason.

Well, if such distinctions are somehow more important than whether something is actually true, I can't see why. They have a certain usefulness in the testing of theories, I suppose, but once you know the actual truth they become meaningless, I think.

Except that you are making a positive assertion, while I am essentially pleading ignorance in the matter.

Premise 1.

No, you are making "God cannot make a proposition true and false", true by that means. "A proposition cannot be both true and false" is true, but I would justify it a priori rather than try to deduce it from other premises.

Tenspace

Of course it's out of context. It's so out of context, I didn't even say it - yguy did:

<<begin quote>>
(posted by yguy)
quote:
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Where did you come up with the flower analogy? You had to realize how weak and unrelated that was as you were typing it. If beauty is truth, then yes, the flower contrived its own beauty, through its ability to attract pollinators better than they less beautiful flowers, in the population of these flowers you mention.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

So let me get this straight: a flower's beauty comes from the fact that it is beautiful?
<<end quote>>

As anyone can see, I said that populations of flowers that are better at attracting pollinators are successful. Maybe it's the bees that contrived the flower's beauty.

(jesse said)
It sounds like he never said "flowers make themselves beautiful by being beautiful", or anything like it (actually, the fact that he responded to your summary with cricket-chirping suggests he found it so ludicrous that it didn't deserve a serious response; honestly yguy, did you really interpret his response to mean 'yes, that would be an accurate summary of my views'?). Basically, I think he's saying that flowers with certain physical characteristics were more likely to attract pollinators than others, and so those characteristics were favored by natural selection. We may happen to find those characteristics "beautiful", but there's no need to assume there is some kind of objective platonic truth about whether something is "beautiful" or not (as you assume there's an objective platonic truth about whether a given act resulting in someone's death is 'murder' or not).

Wasn't me. I din post no cricket chirping

Tenspace

Jesse

yguy:
Again, by that definition, "If a cylinder has a base with area A, and it has height H, then its volume is A*H" is a tautology. By extension, it would seem that all valid syllogisms are as well, but that invalid ones are not. I don't see how any syllogism could fit the definition given earlier.

No, because you can't determine the volume of a cylinder from pure propositional logic, you have to bring in additional mathematical facts. A tautology is something that can be determined to be true using the rules of logic, and nothing else. Of course, we also sometimes use the word "logic" in a more general sense to mean anything that human reason can see must be true a priori (like 1+1=2), but it's only a tautology if it can be judged to be necessarily true using only the formal rules of propositional logic.

Jesse:
In other words, are our identifications of what is "beautiful" really objective, or do they just depend on personal tastes (perhaps genetically-influenced personal tastes that will be the same for all humans).

yguy:
That last part about genetics I could go for.

So, isn't it possible that some fairly "universal" human judgements about beauty are not objective at all? Even if you believe genes influencing our preferences were put there by God, He might have put them there not so we could identify some sort of "objective" beauty, but for other reasons, like that we'd better find members of our own species more attractive than members of other species or else our species wouldn't last very long.

Jesse:
Most humans would probably find an attractive woman more beautiful than a female chimp, but most male chimps would probably feel the opposite way. Are male chimps objectively wrong while humans are objectively right about who's more beautiful?

yguy:
I don't find any meaning in the question. It's a bit like asking if infants could make a reasonable decision about what adults should eat, in my mind.

Well, imagine an intelligent, sentient race of aliens who humans would find physically repulsive. If they all find members of their own species more beautiful than any human (including Nicole Kidman) are they objectively wrong?

Jesse:
So all moral decisions have objective right answers, while some aesthetic decisions have objective right answers (Molly Yard vs. Nicole Kidman) while other aesthetic decisions are just a matter of personal taste (Nicole Kidman vs. Catherine Zeta-Jones)? Where do you draw the line?

yguy:
Why you draw the line has to come first. If you draw it because of what your ego wants, you can't be objective.

That doesn't really answer my question, namely whether you believe some aesthetic decisions have objective right answers while others are a matter of personal taste. And my "where do you draw the line" was more about where the line between the two exists in reality, not the best way for fallible humans to discover this objective reality--it just seems bizarre to me that there could be a real objective truth about whether Nicole Kidman is more beautiful than Molly Yard, but no objective truth about whether she was more beautiful than Catherine Zeta-Jones. This would imply that there is an absolute division of humanity into two groups, those who are objectively more or less beautiful than Nicole Kidman, and those who are "too close to call" so there is no objective truth about whether they are more or less beautiful then Nicole Kidman.

Jesse:
More importantly, how do you know this? How would the world be different if all aesthetic differences were totally objective, or if all aesthetic differences were a matter of personal taste?

yguy:
If we drew such distinctions on an objective rather than an egotistical basis, we'd have Heaven on Earth, I believe.

Your answer has nothing to do with my question, as far as I can tell. I was asking how you know the following is true:

1. For some aesthetic decisions there is an objective right answer, while for others it's just a matter of personal preference

As opposed to:

2. For all aesthetic decisions there is an objective right answer

or:

3. There are no objective truths in the realm of aesthetics, only personal preferences

To repeat the question I asked above, how would the world be different if #2 or #3 were true instead of #1?

Also, to address this "ego" issue that you brought up--do you believe that if a person was totally egoless, all his aesthetic judgements would automatically reflect objective aesthetic truths? Would all his moral judgements automatically reflect objective moral truths, all his mathematical judgements automatically reflect objective mathematical truth, etc.? Couldn't an egoless person still make mistakes, or just not know the answer to questions about objective truth? For that matter, couldn't an egoless person still have personal preferences (say, of whether he'd rather read Dune or Oliver Twist, all else being equal), as long as he is completely accepting of the fact that those preferences may not always be satisfied?

Jesse:
Also, even if you would say something doesn't deserve to be called a "moral" decision if it has no objective right answer, is it possible that some of the decisions we think are moral issues and have strong opinions on are actually just a matter of personal preference?

yguy:
Of course. How do we know which it is? If we're selfish, we won't want to; otherwise we know intuitively.

So lack of ego would automatically convey a kind of omniscience in the moral realm, even about the trickiest moral questions? Is this just speculation on your part, or do you have some reason to be sure it would work this way?

yguy:
We need to separate various forms of infatuation from objective discernment. Kittens are cute because of the feelings they evoke, not because of what they are, and people are cool only to the degree to which others think they are. OTOH, there is a reason Tolstoy, Hugo, Dickens and the like are remembered while other writers of their era are not. Personally, I find Dickens unreadable, but when I listen to his works on tape, I know he wasn't lauded for nothing.

Jesse:
So kittens are not "objectively" cuter than bullfrogs, but Dickens is "objectively" a better writer than, say, Michael Crichton?

yguy:
I don't know about that. Personally, I'd put Frank Herbert in a league with Dickens or the rest of them. However, any we've mentioned so far is obviously better than the writers of romance novels, for instance.

It's "obvious" to me that anyone whose mind is even broadly similar to my own would see Dickens as of being of higher quality than a romance novel. It isn't so obvious that this reflects some kind of objective truth as opposed to just a truth about the preferences of humans of a certain type of background, though.

Jesse:
Again, how do you know when something is "objective discernment" and when something is just a matter of subjective feelings invoked in you? Call me crazy, but people's preference for Nicole Kidman over Molly Yard sounds a lot more like "infatuation" than "objective discernment" to me.

yguy:
It could be either. The trick is, when we look at somebody attractive, the tendency is to see what they can do for our ego rather than the actual person. If you look at Nicole and get aroused, you love her for the way she makes you feel; if she then pulls off her Nicole mask revealing Molly Yard, you'll find her repulsive for the same reason.

It doesn't follow that any aesthetic preference which does not arise from ego gratification automatically reflects some objective reality that would be true for all egoless sentient beings in the universe, though.

Anyway, you said earlier that it was an "objective truth" that Nicole Kidman is more beautiful than Molly Yard, yet here you seem to be agreeing with me that this is more a matter of "infatuation" than "objective discernment".

Jesse:
Well then, that's exactly what I meant when I said that knowing whether a fact is true or false in reality tells you nothing, in itself about whether it's necessary or contingent.

yguy:
Well, if such distinctions are somehow more important than whether something is actually true, I can't see why. They have a certain usefulness in the testing of theories, I suppose, but once you know the actual truth they become meaningless, I think.

I never said this distinction is more important than knowing the truth about our reality, just that it has some importance of its own. Are you saying that once we know that in our reality, both "the Earth is round" and "1+1=2" are true, it is totally meaningless to ask whether God had any choice in either fact?

Jesse:
That said, your statement is true, even if the conclusion is false. To decide that the premise is true, and that therefore the conclusion is true, would be tantamount to making it true by means of the logical process, as I see it.

I don't know what you're referring to here when you say "the statement", "the premise", and "the conclusion". Here, I'll restate it:

premise 1: It is not within God's power to do anything which contradicts the laws of logic"

premise 2: "making a proposition simultaneously true and false would contradict the laws of logic"

conclusion: So, God cannot make a proposition true and false, and "a proposition cannot be both true and false" is a necessary truth.

Which part of this do you disagree with?

yguy:
Premise 1.

Ok, but one can at least say that if premise 1 is true, then the conclusion is true, no? And even if you don't claim to know for sure that premise 1 is true, aren't there at least reasons for suspecting it's likely to be true? If God can do things which contradict the laws of logic, then He can make Himself both exist and not exist, can be both omniscient and ignorant, can be both uncaused and caused, etc. It would then be meaningless to talk about God at all in our ordinary logic-bound language, even to make "negative" statements about what He is not, which on the "probability and science" thread you said you thought were acceptable.

Anyway, let's put it this way. I believe that in objective reality, some truths are necessary while others are contingent. Even if I don't know for sure whether "God never does anything which violates logic (in the more general sense I mentioned in my first comment, not in the narrow sense of violating the rules of propositional logic)" is necessary or contingent, I can at least say that if it is necessarily true, then all other truths which we can deduce logically are also necessarily true.

yguy:
No, you are making "God cannot make a proposition true and false", true by that means. "A proposition cannot be both true and false" is true, but I would justify it a priori rather than try to deduce it from other premises.

You can't judge it to be true a priori unless you already know that "God cannot make a proposition true and false" is true. If it wasn't, then "A proposition cannot be both true and false" would be false (but also true, perhaps!)

Jesse

Ah, I guess it was just a joke by yguy about the fact that you didn't respond to his summary of your argument.

yguy

Forget it. The dead horse we've been beating has become a puree.

Sure, but those other reasons are not necessarily exclusive of the first.

No, because their God-given point of reference in the matter is different from ours. Even so, one could easily imagine that they would know an attractive human from an ugly one, just as we understand the same distinction in horses.

From the POV of the individual, yes. For instance, the girl you find hottest may not be the right one for you to marry.

What you're asking for is a way to assign a numerical value to beauty. Can't be done.

Your second question is answered. As to the question of how I know, it is self-evident.

Yes.

Yes, because he wouldn't make judgments without knowing.

Of course, but when called on the mistake, he wouldn't get defensive.

Of course, because no two of us are alike.

It's not that such a person could necessarily write a book that answered such questions once and for all; but such a person would always know the right thing to do at the time of decision, not necessarily before it.

All I have to do is look back on certain decisions I've made in life that turned out wrong and realize that those decisions were ego-based. QED.

It may not be a consequence of what I said, but it's true anyway.

Remember, I said it could be either. If you look at Nicole objectively, you don't get sucked into all that.

It seems meaningless to me in any case.

Correct. I said that earlier.

None of that follows ineluctably from premise 1, because there are laws of logic which it is not in God's nature to contradict. Essentially it's a question of whether law as codified by humans or God is to be the benchmark. I say God.

What I should have said was, "'A proposition cannot be both true and false' is true as far as I know".

Part of the reason I'm hedging on this comes from some of Jesus' words in the Gospels, such as "If any man come to me, and hate not his father, and mother, and wife, and children, and brethren, and sisters, yea, and his own life also, he cannot be my disciple." Sounds like He's telling people to hate their parents, which contradicts the fifth commandment, but He's not - it was just a way of shocking people so as to make them think. The statement isn't exactly true, taken at face value, but it isn't false either.

Jesse

Jesse:
So, isn't it possible that some fairly "universal" human judgements about beauty are not objective at all? Even if you believe genes influencing our preferences were put there by God, He might have put them there not so we could identify some sort of "objective" beauty, but for other reasons, like that we'd better find members of our own species more attractive than members of other species or else our species wouldn't last very long.

yguy:
Sure, but those other reasons are not necessarily exclusive of the first.

Not necessarily, but it is also not necessarily true that any aesthetic judgements which almost all humans seem to agree on reflect some sort of objective aesthetic truth.

Jesse:
Well, imagine an intelligent, sentient race of aliens who humans would find physically repulsive. If they all find members of their own species more beautiful than any human (including Nicole Kidman) are they objectively wrong?

yguy:
No, because their God-given point of reference in the matter is different from ours. Even so, one could easily imagine that they would know an attractive human from an ugly one, just as we understand the same distinction in horses.

If an aesthetic judgement can be both "objectively true" but also depend on your "point of reference", would the same be true of a moral judgement. Is it possible that "action X is morally wrong" could be objectively true for me but not for you? To me, it seems like the very definition of the word "objective" should mean the truth should be the same for everyone.

Jesse:
That doesn't really answer my question, namely whether you believe some aesthetic decisions have objective right answers while others are a matter of personal taste.

yguy:
From the POV of the individual, yes. For instance, the girl you find hottest may not be the right one for you to marry.

Again, it doesn't make sense to me that a proposition could really be "objectively true" if it depends on the "POV of the individual." Aren't propositions whose truth depends on your point of view subjective, by definition?

Jesse:
And my "where do you draw the line" was more about where the line between the two exists in reality, not the best way for fallible humans to discover this objective reality--it just seems bizarre to me that there could be a real objective truth about whether Nicole Kidman is more beautiful than Molly Yard, but no objective truth about whether she was more beautiful than Catherine Zeta-Jones.

yguy:
What you're asking for is a way to assign a numerical value to beauty. Can't be done.

I don't think it can be done either, but that's because I don't believe that there is an objective truth about which of two people/objects/whatever is "really" more beautiful. You, on the other hand, claimed earlier that it was objectively true that Nicole Kidman's beauty > Molly Yard's beauty, that it was objectively true that the quality of a Charles Dickens novel > the quality of a romance novel, etc.

Jesse:
More importantly, how do you know this? How would the world be different if all aesthetic differences were totally objective, or if all aesthetic differences were a matter of personal taste?

yguy:
If we drew such distinctions on an objective rather than an egotistical basis, we'd have Heaven on Earth, I believe.

Jesse:
Your answer has nothing to do with my question, as far as I can tell.

yguy:
Your second question is answered.

Where? Could you quote the response where you answered it?

Jesse:
Also, to address this "ego" issue that you brought up--do you believe that if a person was totally egoless, all his aesthetic judgements would automatically reflect objective aesthetic truths?

yguy:
Yes.

So an egoless person couldn't have individual tastes? All egoless person would be exactly alike in their judgements of aesthetic quality? Would an egoless human and an egoless alien agree on which is more beautiful, a human female or an alien female? This would contradict your "depends on your point of view" statement earlier. Also, would all egoless people agree on whether a given face was more beautiful, less beautiful, or equally beautiful as Nicole Kidman's face? If so, that would mean you could assign "numerical values" to beauty.

Jesse:
Would all his moral judgements automatically reflect objective moral truths, all his mathematical judgements automatically reflect objective mathematical truth, etc.?

yguy:
Yes, because he wouldn't make judgments without knowing.

Jesse:
Couldn't an egoless person still make mistakes, or just not know the answer to questions about objective truth?

yguy:
Of course, but when called on the mistake, he wouldn't get defensive.

How could he make mistakes, when you just said he wouldn't make judgements without knowing, and also answered "yes" to my question about whether his judgements would "automatically" reflect objective truth?

Jesse:
For that matter, couldn't an egoless person still have personal preferences (say, of whether he'd rather read Dune or Oliver Twist, all else being equal), as long as he is completely accepting of the fact that those preferences may not always be satisfied?

yguy:
Of course, because no two of us are alike.

But you just answered "yes" to my question about whether his aesthetic judgments would "automatically reflect objective aesthetic truths." If one egoless person prefers Oliver Twist and another prefers Dune, how can both their aesthetic judgments be reflecting objective aesthetic truths?

Jesse:
So lack of ego would automatically convey a kind of omniscience in the moral realm, even about the trickiest moral questions?

yguy:
It's not that such a person could necessarily write a book that answered such questions once and for all; but such a person would always know the right thing to do at the time of decision, not necessarily before it.

Do you think an egoless person would also always know the right answer to a mathematical question at the moment it was presented to him? If not, how can you be so sure that an egoless person would always know the right moral decision?

You're making a huge leap here, from "ego sometimes interferes with being able to see the best answer to a moral question" to "ego is the only think standing in the way of always knowing the right answer to moral questions in every situation." Assuming you've never met any egoless people in your life, this would seem to be little more than total speculation on your part.

Jesse:
Is this just speculation on your part, or do you have some reason to be sure it would work this way?

yguy:
All I have to do is look back on certain decisions I've made in life that turned out wrong and realize that those decisions were ego-based. QED.

Again, it's a pretty huge leap from "X often interferes with my ability to do Y" to "if X was removed, I would be able to do Y perfectly." For example, lack of sleep may interfere with a person's ability to ace a test, but that doesn't mean that if they get a good night's rest they're automatically going to get 100% on any test they're given.

Jesse:
It doesn't follow that any aesthetic preference which does not arise from ego gratification automatically reflects some objective reality that would be true for all egoless sentient beings in the universe, though.

yguy:
It may not be a consequence of what I said, but it's true anyway.

So you agree that any aesthetic truth which is really "objective" must be true for all egoless sentient beings in the universe? Is there an objective truth about whether a human would be more beautiful than an alien, when it is in the genes of all humans to find the human more beautiful and in the genes of all the alien's species to find the alien more beautiful?

And again, how do you know this is true? Is it just some sort of mystical insight on your part, or do you have reasons better than your "ego often gets in the way of objectivity" argument?

Jesse:
Anyway, you said earlier that it was an "objective truth" that Nicole Kidman is more beautiful than Molly Yard, yet here you seem to be agreeing with me that this is more a matter of "infatuation" than "objective discernment".

yguy:
Remember, I said it could be either. If you look at Nicole objectively, you don't get sucked into all that.

OK, just to be clear, my understanding is that you're saying that an individual who thinks Nicole Kidman is more beautiful may be doing so for ego-related relations, but meanwhile it really is an objective truth that Nicole Kidman is more beautiful, no?

Again, if you think there are objective truths about which of two people is more beautiful, then a natural consequence of that is that you can assign objective numerical values to beauty. Just get someone with perfect insight into aesthetic truth--whether an egoless person, an angel, God, whoever--to tell you, for every possible pair of people, which one is more beautiful, or if they're equally beautiful. Then, assuming objective beauty is commutative (ie if A is more beautiful than B, and B is more beautiful than C, then A is more beautiful then C) then all humans can be placed into groups of "equally beautiful" people, and the groups can be ordered according to beauty (the group that includes the people or person who have no one more beautiful than them can be given the beauty rating 1, the group that is less beautiful than group 1 but more beautiful than all other groups can be given the beauty rating 2, etc., all the way down to the ugliest group).

Jesse:
I never said this distinction is more important than knowing the truth about our reality, just that it has some importance of its own. Are you saying that once we know that in our reality, both "the Earth is round" and "1+1=2" are true, it is totally meaningless to ask whether God had any choice in either fact?

yguy:
It seems meaningless to me in any case.

So if someone said, "God had no choice in making the earth round, it would not have been within His power to have made the earth flat" you would not say this statement is wrong, just that it's meaningless? Even God wouldn't have a definite answer to the question of whether it's true, any more than He would for some other meaningless statement like "green ideas sleep furiously?"

Jesse:
Ok, but one can at least say that if premise 1 is true, then the conclusion is true, no?

yguy:
Correct. I said that earlier.

But just above you seemed to say that premise 1 is meaningless, in which case it can't really be true or false.

Jesse:
And even if you don't claim to know for sure that premise 1 is true, aren't there at least reasons for suspecting it's likely to be true? If God can do things which contradict the laws of logic, then He can make Himself both exist and not exist, can be both omniscient and ignorant, can be both uncaused and caused, etc.

yguy:
None of that follows ineluctably from premise 1, because there are laws of logic which it is not in God's nature to contradict. Essentially it's a question of whether law as codified by humans or God is to be the benchmark. I say God.

So it's not in God's nature to contradict them, even though you think it's possible that He might have the power to contradict them? Well, where did God's nature come from? Did He create it Himself? I would also ask if God's nature is necessarily the way it is or if it just happens to be that way, but I guess you'd say that's a meaningless question.

I think your statement that the laws of logic were "codified by humans" is a little unclear--it's not as if the laws of logic themselves were created by humans, even though humans wrote them down at some point. If you accept that the human mind is structured in such a way that we have some kind of a priori insight into preexisting moral truths, can't the same be true of preexisting logical truths? Whether these moral and logical truths were set by a free choice made by God, or whether even God had no choice in the matter, is an issue theists disagree on.

yguy:
What I should have said was, "'A proposition cannot be both true and false' is true as far as I know".

Part of the reason I'm hedging on this comes from some of Jesus' words in the Gospels, such as "If any man come to me, and hate not his father, and mother, and wife, and children, and brethren, and sisters, yea, and his own life also, he cannot be my disciple." Sounds like He's telling people to hate their parents, which contradicts the fifth commandment, but He's not - it was just a way of shocking people so as to make them think. The statement isn't exactly true, taken at face value, but it isn't false either.

Ordinary language is a lot more vague than the language we use when we are trying to be precise and perfectly logical. For instance, if you ask me a question and I reply "yes and no", that doesn't mean I think there is any clearly-defined proposition that is simultaneously true and false, it means something more like "the answer is 'yes' if I interpret your question in one sense, but 'no' if I interpret it in another."