Jesse

Jesse:
Is there anything inherently impossible about sentient butterflies (if you can accept the possibility of aliens on Pluto, I don't see how sentient butterflies would be any more outlandish?)

yguy:
It is not so much the sentience of butterflies that is outlandish, but the idea that I could be a figment of such a creature's imagination. That would make the butterfly my creator, and me the creation of another creation. There is only one Creator.

You wouldn't be a character in the butterfly's dream, you would be the butterfly, having a dream where he had a different identity. Do you think it is impossible that tomorrow night you will dream you are, say, Batman?

Jesse:
Is there anything inherently impossible about the idea that your conscious experience is just a dream, and in a minute you'll wake up into the "real world" which may differ in certain ways from the dreamworld?

yguy:
No, and it's not far from the truth. It is my consciousness being the creation of another creature that is the problem.

Again, in this scenario you are the butterfly, you're just having a dream where your identity is different than what it is in real life.

yguy:
None. I'm aware that none of this logically excludes evolution with respect to humankind, but it is such observations which brought me to the realization of the truth of the matter.

Jesse:
But if you formed this opinion based on "observations" it obviously wasn't something you could know a priori with absolute certainty.

yguy:
The observations are not the basis for the realization, only the catalysts for it.

yguy, it seems like a lot of your "absolutely certain beliefs" are just things you decide by intuition and then come up with ad hoc rationalizations for in retrospect. You still haven't been able to tell me what is absolutely impossible about the scenario where God designs the laws of the universe so that panpsychism is true and all systems are "in His image" to some extent, but also designs the "psychophysical laws" so that increases in certain kinds of brain complexity will bring systems closer to "His image" in terms of things like moral understanding and free will, and God allows this complexity to increase through an evolutionary process of RM&NS. You also haven't explained how you know with absolute certainty that it's impossible that we aren't "made in His image" in the first place, or that it's impossible that God could be anything other than personal.

Obviously with any foundational belief there are limits to how much you can explain it, but it's also not like these beliefs just appear to us in a flash of intuition and we can say nothing about them--usually we should be able to at least point to where you'd get some kind of contradiction if you said the belief was false. For example, for my foundational belief that I exist, I can say "well, I am consciously experiencing the question of whether I exist right now, and it seems to me that it would be absolutely impossible for a nonexistent being to consciously experience anything." So where are the contradictions inherent in things like my panpsychist evolutionary scenario above? It won't do just to point to various supposed pieces of evidence against evolution, and then say that in some vague sense they were the "catalyst" for your revelation that human evolution is absolutely impossible.

yguy

yguy: There is a point, but you missed it. I'll say it just once more: there is a means by which you know that 1+1=2. By that same means I know that God exists.

lob: I know x=x so therefore I know God exists?

Aside from the fact that I never claimed x=x is anything but a tautology, your transfiguration of what I said would mean that my knowlege of God's existence follows from my knowledge that x=x. Had I meant to say that, I would have. Trust me.

Yes.

It is no more a tautology than saying the ratio between a circle's diameter and its circumference is a constant. The first is intuitively obvious to the vast majority of people. To those with a slightly higher level of perception, so is the second. Having determined this fact regarding circles, one may proceed to determine the constant, the area of a circle, and so forth; likewise, having determined that 1+1=2, one can see that 2+1=3, 3+2=5, etc. Multiplication being essentially repetitive addition, one can then see that 3*2=6, etc.

Actually, I've done it twice now.

No, the gist is that the means by which I know the first and the means by which I know the second are one and the same.

If you're the type who eats differential equations for breakfast, it may indeed be trivial from your POV, but tautological it certainly is not. If 1+1=2 were false, mathematics as we know it would collapse instantly.

Then at least in your case, I have failed to get the point across. Sorry about that, chief.

yguy

I couldn't BE a butterfly, because I'm NOT a butterfly.

I could dream lots of loony things.

That is not how I understood the original scenario, but I'm not a butterfly, so it doesn't matter.

I've tried to do that, but obviously none of it clicks for you. Don't know what I can do about that just now.

Jesse

yguy:
I couldn't BE a butterfly, because I'm NOT a butterfly.

How do you know this? Do you agree that it's logically possible you can dream you have an identity different from your actual identity (Batman, for example)? Do you agree that it's logically possible that you're dreaming right now? Do you agree that it's logically possible that a sentient butterfly could have a dream where he has an identity different from his actual identity? If so, I don't see any way you can avoid the conclusion that it's logically possible that "in real life" you are a sentient butterfly, and right now you're just dreaming about having a different identity.

Jesse:
Again, in this scenario you are the butterfly, you're just having a dream where your identity is different than what it is in real life.

yguy:
That is not how I understood the original scenario, but I'm not a butterfly, so it doesn't matter.

That sounds like another real-world argument, not an argument about what is logically possible. If you can accept the possibility that other humans are actually aardvarks in human suits, as I thought you did earlier, isn't it possible that you are in fact a sentient aardvark in a human suit who just doesn't realize that the suit isn't his real body, because he's been living in it since birth? What's the difference between this and being a sentient butterfly having a dream of being a man?

Jesse:
Obviously with any foundational belief there are limits to how much you can explain it, but it's also not like these beliefs just appear to us in a flash of intuition and we can say nothing about them--usually we should be able to at least point to where you'd get some kind of contradiction if you said the belief was false.

yguy:
I've tried to do that, but obviously none of it clicks for you.

No you haven't, at least not as far as I can tell. Not once in responding to my panpsychist evolutionary argument did I see you try to show how a logical contradiction follows from that scenario. Neither did you explain why a logical contradiction would follow if we are not "made in God's image". If you think you did, please quote the post where you did so.

Lobstrosity

I agree. Given 1+1=2, 1+1+1=3, 1+1+1+1=4, ..., all other addition and multiplication is trivially obvious (or put another way, given that 1 is the multiplicative identity). So I ask you, once again, justify that 1+1=2 is not a tautology. Please define for me what the concepts one and two mean. Demonstrate that this relation is non-trivial and actually conveys information beyond simply stating a method of defining two.

And the means by which you know the first is because it's a tautology--1+1 is the basic definition of two. Once again, if you disagree, please tell me what two is. Don't go shifting to a new mathematical example, either, as 1+1=2 should be as fully capable of supporting your claim as any other mathematical relation. Adding complexity to make the tautology non-obvious is just a masking tactic. Since it is a tautology, it certainly doesn't say much about the means by which you know God.

yguy

The same way you know YOU are not a butterfly.

Obviously.

It is logically possible, but not actually possible, using "dreaming" in the ordinary sense of the word.

Yes.

It's a theoretical possibility in the world of make-believe. So what?

I don't, and I didn't mean to convey that impression.

yguy

Forget it.

Jesse

yguy, everything you say is backing up my impression that you just aren't able or willing to rigorously distinguish between the notion that something is logically impossible and just having a strong conviction that something isn't true in the reality. Obviously it is very unlikely that other people are sentient aardvarks in human suits, but equally obviously it is not "logically impossible", and anyone who has any real understanding of the distinction between the two concepts should be able to see this. Because you fail to distinguish the two, your claim that you are absolutely certain that God exists, in the same sense that you are certain that 1+1=2, is pretty useless to me; after all, you are apparently only "certain" that 1+1=2 in the same sense that you're certain that other humans aren't really sentient aardvarks in disguise. For me there is a qualitative difference between the two types of certainty, but since for you there doesn't seem to be, we're just talking past each other--I am not really interested in just hearing you recite your personal convictions if you can't offer some fundamental logical or philosophical reasons why they must be true (showing a contradiction would follow from assuming they're not, for example).

Jesse

Lobstrosity:
I agree. Given 1+1=2, 1+1+1=3, 1+1+1+1=4, ..., all other addition and multiplication is trivially obvious (or put another way, given that 1 is the multiplicative identity). So I ask you, once again, justify that 1+1=2 is not a tautology.

You still haven't addressed my arguments as to why it's not a tautology. How about this--instead of saying "I know it is true that 1+1=2", what if I were to say "I know it is true that the axioms of peano arithmetic cannot be used to derive a contradiction." Would you agree that with a little reflection on our "model" of what they symbols used in these axioms mean, any mathematician can see that this must be true? Would you say this statement was a tautology as well?

yguy

It's not just unlikely that the people I see are aardvarks in human suits, its impossible. Only in the realm of imagination is it logically possible.

I mean fer cying out loud, Jesse, is it really so unreasonable to assert that some ideas are too idiotic to give a second thought to?

Bingo.