Albert Cipriani

Oxymoron says:
But your brain does this all the time. For example, your eyes deliver an upside-down and reversed image of the world to your brain. As infants, our brains flip and reverse this image. As adults, you can wear special prisms to “correct” how your brain is lying about what your eyes are relaying to it. Take off the prisms, and the truth will hold for several months until the brain, tiring of the extra processing the truth causes it, flips and reverses the optically correct image again.

So tho you yourself, being the upright and moral man you are, don’t choose to believe what you know is false, your brain does. If you persist with your impossibly high unrealistic standards, me thinks you’re on your way to schizophrenia.

Besides, I never asked you to believe in something you “KNEW WAS FALSE.” You’re putting words into my mouth. I asked you to “honestly believe a lie” that made you feel good. If you honestly believed a lie that made you feel good, you would not know it was false. You could have your cake and eat it too. Belief in God is like that.

Neither of us can know for sure that God exists or does not exist. So why not believe whatever makes you feel the best? If you agree that no one can know, you cannot turn around and claim not to be able to believe in God because you know that belief to be false. The determining factor for believing things we cannot know, then, ought to simply be what belief feels best.

Ergo, the question is, are you too stoic to be simple?
– Sincerely, Albert the Traditional Catholic
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99Percent

How do you know what my brain is perceiving? Maybe what you say is up, is down for me? Maybe your red is a blue for me and my blue is red for you? Ultimately you cannot know this, since you would have to be me to know that and that is impossible, since I am already me.

Albert Cipriani

Sophistry thy name is 99%,
In fact, 99%, you gotta change your name to 100%. Cuz that’s what this is, 100% unadulterated sophistry:
Whether or not your down is my up makes not one iota of difference to the issue at hand. Fact is, your brain flips whatever it is that you optically perceive. And if you optically flip it back, your brain trumps you by counter-flipping it again. Point is, your mind has got a mind of its own on this count, no matter what you or Mr. Clinton think up or down is.

Ultimately nothing can be known. That’s a metaphysical fact, not a relevant species of information in relation to empirical facts. – Sincerely, Albert the Traditional Catholic
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99Percent

Sorry, but this is not a fact at all. You don't know what I optically perceive. No one does, but me.

What is important is that we can both agree that up is up and down is down, that when I say a rose is red you agree with me even if you see it as blue if I knew exactly how you perceive it and I see that you see it as blue (which I can't anyway).

This shows that there is an agreement between you and I, where feelings have nothing to do. So much for your 100% sophistry strawman argument.

Albert Cipriani

Mr. Ostrich, a.k.a. 99%, sharing his unique perspective on optics:
This can only mean that you’ve never experienced the majesty of standing behind a large-format camera and focusing a scene on its ground glass. If you had, you’d know first hand of the optical principle whereby ALL lenses flip their image.

The human eye is a lens. Ergo, the light that enters it converges at the nodal point midway between the pupil and the retina before the light diverges into the flipped image at the focal plane of the retina. This is a fact. What you say about this fact is your sophistry.

Come clean, 99%. This is your opportunity to be a man about it and say three simple words that you’ve never said to me before, “Yeah, you’re right.” It’s not so hard to do. It would improve your credibility with me and others.

Otherwise, the only way you can breathe life into your sophistry is to claim that our eyes are not lenses. After all, the mother ship could be projecting directly into our brains all the things we apparently see. Yeah, that way you can have your down and up not be my down or up.

By the way, I really did bake an upside-down cake two days ago. I’ll await your response to this issue before I decide how to eat it. – Snickering, On the Way to the Fridge, Albert the Traditional Catholic
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TerryTryon

I have read this thread, without comment thus far, but would now like to reflect what has been said in a slightly different frame of reference.

The reason that we can know nothing with absolute certainty is because any proposition we care to state can be refuted with an ad hoc explanation with no evidence whatever to support it. Since, ignorance of evidence never refutes an argument, the counter proposition must stand as an alternative—even if it is transparent nonsense. For anything you say that is sensible, I can offer a nonsensical counter argument, for which no evidence can be produced in support or no. Even if, someone offers evidence that disproves the counter proposition, I can dismiss that evidence out of hand.

We want to appeal to Occam’s razor. But, the razor is a rule of thumb, not hard logic. Some things that appear simple cause and effect, are in truth long lines of dominoes each waiting to be the cause of the effect which in turn becomes the cause of the next effect, mocking Occam’s razor with each tumbling piece.

To get around this impasse, we agree to a few assumptions that let us get a grasp on reality, knowing all the time that these assumptions are not supported. These are such things as the idea that time is continuous and linear. We agree that there is such a thing as reality, which we perceive with limitations, but generally correctly. We also agree that perceptions are generally coherent from person to person.

To these assumptions, we add a few logical/mathematical axioms, and with this shaky quivering foundation, we begin to build a system of knowledge that becomes ever more coherent and systematic. We gain confidence as we are able to make predictions with accuracy, and are able to perform great feats with our system.

One by one, shamans, gods, revelation, magic, psychic knowledge, tabus, and otherworlds have been pushed out of our system of knowledge [small k] because these concepts are incoherent with it, do not produce reliable predictions, and are generally useless in bringing about useful ends. There are those who persist in magical thinking, but their efforts are shown to be ineffectual, self-contradictory, and futile. They become parasites on our framework of knowledge, to paraphrase Paul, having a form of truth [once again small t], but denying the power thereof.

Stupid arguments for god’s existence are sometimes lame attempts at sophistry. They are sometimes sincere, but incoherent, attempts to enmesh the god concept in areas where the concept has long since become irrelevant. And very often, they are puerile retorts of the kind heard in schoolyards around the world, unworthy of consideration, let alone rebuttal.

Oxymoron

It's not a lie. The image I perceive is a good representation of the world out there. When I reach out to an object, it's there, not somewhere else, and that's all I need. How the physical hardware and the encapsulated behaviour of the software delivers that representation is neither here nor there.

Incidentally, the word "good" in the above paragraph sould be interpreted as 'sufficient to benefit my survival'. If my brain lied to me about the world, I suspect my chances of dying (in an otherwise hostile environment) would be considerably greater.

My brain chooses nothing. It's just a lump of mechanical hardware. Choice exists at a considerably higher level of abstraction, even if it is subconscious. You clearly misunderstand schizophrenia - a complex set of conditions that have less to do with multiple personalities and more with detachment from reality. I can't imagine any more detached from reality than imagining a big sky daddy is looking out for you - the schizophrenic is much more likely to be you, Albert.

Albert Cipriani

Alas,
A day has elapsed and there’s still no retraction from 99%. Let’s magnanimously assume that it’s not for lack of intent. He probably just can’t reach up – instead of down – to his computer because of those prisms he’s wearing.

After my pinapple upside-down cake last night, alll I’ve got now is oxymoron’s post to chew on for breakfast. Terry’s speech doesn’t count. There’s nothing there (period, as well as there’s nothing there) to disagree with except his gratuitous insults at the end which, to quote him, are “unworthy of consideration, let alone rebuttal.”

But oxymoron assumes my theistic sitz im leben when he asserts that his atheistic perspective is:
Substitute "God" for his "image" and "object" and you've got my view of the universe. Yeah, he’s really talking about mere visible objects. But objects, sensible objects, and nothing but sensible objects so help him God. That is, he’s talking about a material world devoid of God. Notice how the raison d’etre of his materialism is based upon a purely subjective standard? Just like how it is with most theists. He calls his view that which is “sufficient to benefit my survival.” Ditto for us theists!

Only problem is, his view is shortsighted. His idea of the good extends only to his survival here and now. Whereas, the theist conception of the good is our eternal survival.

He says,
You got that right. Ergo, (borrowing from Catholic theological terminology) the “lies” our brain tells us are only material, not formal lies. They work. We ought not to resist them. Likewise, our faith in God is only a material fairy tale, not a formal one. It, like the lies our brain tells us, can work toward our survival.

Oxymoron demonstrating the last two syllables of his handle:
Everything you are “seeing” this very moment is not really being seen, but is being compiled by your brain based upon the many rules iIT (not your conscious mind) has decided to employ to interpret the garbled data transmitted to it via your optic nerve.

Fine. And you clearly misunderstand how to see clearly. – Sincerely, Albert the Traditional Catholic
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Oxymoron

Cheap shot, Albert. If it weren't implicitly ironic on my part, I'd have an inclination to report that insult to a mod. You seem quite free and easy with your insults. I would politely suggest that you refrain, as it does take the enjoyment out of the debate.

Albert Cipriani

Sorry Oxy,
I thought my reference to the last two syllables of your handle was in good fun. It was the verbal equivalent of that Far Side comic where there’s this deer that sports a huge bulls-eye target on its side. Another deer tells its partner, “Tough break, that’s one hell of a birthmark!”

Anyway, that’s how I see your handle. It’s just begging for cheap shots. But I will restrain myself since you don’t find them in good taste. – Cheers, Albert the Traditional Catholic
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