SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
If you had big plans this weekend, David Meade regrets to inform you that the world will be ending Saturday.
Meade, a Christian numerologist and self-described "researcher," says Sept. 23 is foretold in the Bible's Book of Revelation as the day a series of catastrophic events will begin, and as a result, "a major part of the world will not be the same," the Washington Post reports.
The Bible prophecies a woman "clothed with the sun" and a "crown of 12 stars" giving birth to a boy who will "rule all the nations" while she fights off a seven-headed dragon. The woman, Meade says, is the constellation Virgo, which on Saturday will be positioned under nine stars and three planets, per Popular Mechanics.
The baby boy will be the planet Jupiter, which will be moving out of Virgo on that night.
According to Meade, who says he studied astronomy at an unspecified university in Kentucky, the great change in our world will be the result of the arrival of Nibiru, a planet famous in conspiracy circles but which astronomers say doesn't exist.
http://wnep.com/2017/09/20/researcher-says-this-saturday-will-be-the-end-of-the-world/
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/acts-of-faith/wp/2017/09/17/the-world-as-we-know-it-is-about-to-end-again-if-you-believe-this-biblical-doomsday-claim/ (soft paywalled)
(Score: 1) by khallow on Friday September 22 2017, @08:53PM (7 children)
Fine. Do it then. Show us how it's done rather than this pointless blather.
For me, I don't consider radical doubt useful because it's too easy to veer so far off that even the most basic axioms are in doubt (that includes "I think therefore I am/act" empirical basics). For example, what's the point of considering that the things I hold more or less correct are due solely to an evil deity (who is so clever that we can't observe it much less infer its motives) warping the universe to give a false impression? It's not remotely viable to consider even if it were true.
Instead, a superior approach is to consider the consequences of the assumptions from within the system of belief itself. What contradictions or absurd conclusions are reached? If I reach an untenable place from inside the reasoning itself, that's far more damning than some "in this absurdly contrived situation which we couldn't ever observe, it would be wrong". Self-inconsistency is something we can infer and hence, something that philosophy can help us with our reasoning.
So here's my take on the situation. A key goal of such philosophical doubt is to help determine inconsistencies in a system of beliefs. I believe these can be divided into three categories: intrinsic inconsistencies, extrinsic empirical inconsistencies, and extrinsic non-empirical inconsistencies. I've already discussed intrinsic inconsistencies and extrinsic non-empirical inconsistencies above. But to be more clear, an intrinsic inconsistency is a contradiction or untenable, absurd situation that comes about due to the logic of the belief system. An extrinsic inconsistency comes about due to conflict with something outside of the belief system. Extrinsic non-empirical inconsistencies are things like an evil deity warping your thought processes so that you think a statement is well-founded when it's actually not. The scenarios can get ridiculously elaborate, and there's no way to perfectly rule them out.
Then we come to extrinsic empirical inconsistencies which can happen any time your beliefs rub against the real world. If I assert that the Moon is made purely of green cheese, then an observation that the Moon is not green, would be an inconsistency. I can, of course, modify the assertion. Maybe the Moon is made of gray cheese, or maybe it has a gray-colored rind. Direct observation of Moon rocks would provide further inconsistency with the statement.
Thus, observation can generate inconsistencies. And depending on the degree of inconsistency (for example, it might be a manifestation of an intrinsic inconsistency as the belief system is applied to the real world or it might be due to a too simple model that doesn't adequately cover complexity in the real world case as commonly happens with economic models), that might or might not threaten the viability of the theory rather than merely require modification.
In particular, aristarchus saying that I'm wrong or that I need to read a certain treatise (merely to imply that I'm ignorant, if I don't), is not an inconsistency and hence, not a challenge to my beliefs.
(Score: 2) by aristarchus on Friday September 22 2017, @10:19PM (6 children)
Snowflake alert! I only regret, khallow, that you cannot default mod my posts any lower than you can. Unfortunately, you may end up reading some of what I write. Oh, you do not know what "empirical" means, in an epistemological sense.
Except, my dear and fluffy khallow, some do know it is true, and the evil genie that has gotten ahold of your thinkings is the Vienna Circle. There really is only one question, khallow, "What is the Matrix?" Empirical, you say? Interesting.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Saturday September 23 2017, @12:09AM (5 children)
And one of your other well-used fallacies, argument by assertion. Your reasoning is and always has been deeply broken. Hence, my earlier call for a study of basic rhetoric.
The obvious rebuttal is that you don't know what you can't know.
(Score: 2) by aristarchus on Saturday September 23 2017, @12:21AM (4 children)
I know you are, but what am I?
Ad hominem is all you got? khallow, I am deeply disappointed in you. And basic rhetoric? You do know I am Greek? We invented rhetoric, rhetoric is a Greek word, in fact. You are failing to convince even yourself here.
Oh, great, now people will have to start drinking. Does the use of your signature phrase mean you have been triggered? Well the obvious rejoinder is that just because you don't know something, that does not entail that you cannot know it. A little effort, eh. Like this concept of "property" and the notion of "desert", where do these come from? But, I can see you are tired, and a bit miffed. So take a break, khallow. You do not have to answer every post that points out your ideological intentional ignorance.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Saturday September 23 2017, @01:33AM (3 children)
That's a case of the straw man fallacy. I didn't make such a claim. Recall that you asserted people "know" things without having a basis for that knowledge. I am of the opinion that such a basis can only be obtained from either internal reasoning or external observation of reality.
Our attempts to make sense of the world. This is knowledge you can know, because you can observe both the usage of the terms and the situations that the terms are employed in. And in the real world, that's how children learn the use of these terms. Further, this is an example of the red herring fallacy since these concepts are irrelevant to my post about evil deities faking reality, a scenario which is not made more or less likely, for example, by our use of the term, "desert" or the eating traditions that "desert" labels.
Let's not get ahead of ourselves. Accusing someone without a shred of evidence is weaker than "pointing out". A Perl script which happens to post accusations of "ideological intentional ignorance" of random people on SN would have just as much information content as your posts do and be as useful.
This is also an example of fallacy of presupposition since as noted above, you haven't bothered, ever, to establish a basis for the accusation. Notice the pattern here - three fallacies in a small post.
I use this term to indicate that someone has ignored something obvious. Hence, the "obvious rebuttal" which you should have seen coming. A real philosopher would anticipate it rather than come up with yet more logical and rhetorical fallacies after the fact. Sure, the term is insulting, but it is deserved in this case.
I am continually reminded of the tragedy/farce here. Someone who went through the effort of choosing a name of a philosopher they apparently admired, yet they can't do rudimentary philosophical debate. It has to be one of the larger anti-climaxes of SN.
(Score: 2) by aristarchus on Saturday September 23 2017, @08:55AM (2 children)
C'mon, khallow! Thou dost protest too much!
I am bothered that you doubt my claim to be the actual aristarchus of Samos, with no evidence at all. Your claim of empiricism fails you. And the "obvious rebuttal" has become a meme here on SoylentNews precisely because it is khallow bringing up something that is by no means obvious. Do you think we would all be playing drinking games based on your intellectual tics, if we thought they were at all well founded?
But here is where it truly hurts:
Continually, eh? Then you should be able to cite the locus originalis of this saying! Ah, it was a famous philosopher, German, and you accuse me of being a fake? I am sorry, khallow, but the more you carry on these discussions, the more you expose yourself as an intellectual fraud. You do not know what you are talking about, and it has become more than apparent to everyone but yourself that you have no idea what I am talking about. But, you know, I am willing to continue the dialogue. I will call you names, but only deserved ones.
And, it does not matter what you say about me, because it really is simply obvious to everyone that you are not familiar with the pertinent documents of western, or any, civilization. So, Descartes, Mediations,
That is just the beginning. Meditate upon it, if you have the time or the ability.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Saturday September 23 2017, @12:53PM (1 child)
(Score: 2) by aristarchus on Monday September 25 2017, @09:09AM
Let's not, and instead mediate on the nature of property rights. Are they features of the nature world that we can perceive and verify empirically? Or are the fictions of law, where we have to go to court to find out where they lie? And in either case, are they part of what it means to be a sovereign individual self-consciousness, or are they only allocated to serve the greater good? Really, when Marx has a commodity spin about on its head claiming it possesses intrinsic worth, well, that is not far from saying property rights are god, or nature, given. But of course, there is no such thing as property, there is only tax liability.