From: johnny moral (johnnymoral@hotmail.com)
Date: Wed Mar 12 2003 - 23:59:38 GMT
>No, Platt does not agree. To assert that we can never know everything
>is not to assert we can never know anything. We can know plenty, but
>not everything. There's lots we know is certainly true, that which we
>have no doubt whatsoever, beginning with existence. Otherwise, we
>wouldn't be here.
But if you agree you don't know everything, I think you have to accept the
remote possibility that you are wrong about things. Doubt has entered the
picture about virtually everything, except the few universal truths (I/we
exist, and I/we don't know everything).
>How's that again? Do you doubt my assertion? [about the truth of statement
>regarding 2nd paragraph]
Well, yes. I'd have to go look it up in a book to be sure, and even then
I'd only be trusting the book. Even if I saw it with my own eyes, I'd have
to be trusting my eyes. So, I consult ten books, get 100 people to agree
with me that their eyes see the same thing, and reduce the doubt down to
feel confident that it is true - I now fully expect the 11th book and the
101st person to agree. I get to a point where I can treat the expectation
like absolute truth and get on with living. But it never is, really, it's
always just expectation. But you're right, if we get stuck wallowing in
doubt, we can't live.
But is what you are asking - "Is there a true second paragraph, regardless
of whether anyone can know it with certainty or not?" I'd say yes, by
definition. I think doubt and expectation imply a corresponding real truth
to expect or doubt, they'd be meaningless otherwise.
I think about Schroedinger's Cat [google it, it's quite interesting]. The
radical point of that thought experiement was that the cat being alive or
dead is not merely an unknown, but that it is (truly?) in a state of
probability, ready to be either very much alive or stone cold dead the
moment we open the box. It is a cloud of being both dead and alive, in
proportional expectations. It is actually said to be in BOTH states until
someone opens the box.
ooh, this reminds me of an Ayn Rand quote I dug up:
"My morality, the morality of reason, is contained in a single axiom:
existence exists—and in a single choice: to live. The rest proceeds from
these. To live, man must hold three things as the ruling values of his life:
Reason—Purpose—Self-esteem. Reason, as his only tool of knowledge—Purpose,
as his choice of the happiness which that tool must proceed to
achieve—Self-esteem, as his inviolate certainty that his mind is competent
to think and his person is worthy of happiness, which means: worthy of
living. These three values imply and require all of man's virtues"
— Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged.
I think that realtes to what I am saying :) It is self-esteem that makes us
trust our expectations and allows us to stay afloat in the sea of doubt
rather than drown trying to climb out of it because we fear it.
> > >I believe is it absolutely and forever moral to eliminate slavery.
> > >How about you?
And that is how we should feel today. We always take our expecations and
treat them like absolutes. We cast them as Principles, Intellectually, so
that they can be unthinkingly accepted as social patterns. If something is
considered a principle, then we have to treat it like one and not say it is
a temporary principle. We can at the Intellectual level, like we are doing
here, but we can't let the Intellect's awareness of its own intellect chip
away at the very foundations it has created and stands on.
> > I define morality as what people are expected to do. If people were
> > expected to have or be slaves, then it was moral. People are no longer
> > expected to have or be slaves, so it isn't moral. The expetation
>changed
> > because truth is contingent. if truth wasn't, slavery would still be
>OK.
>
>Nevermind what "people" expect or think. Do YOU believe slavery is
>absolutely wrong?
Sure. But I can't "nevermind" what people think. How does one do that?
There WAS slavery, and there would still be slavery, if morality hadn't
changed (unless you ascribe the change to economic changes and
industrialization). I don't think people were less moral back then, they
just had different expectations. I don't think they accepted evil over good
more than people today, they feared being wrong and bad as much as anyone
ever does, probably, right? They were our grandparents, after all, how
different could they have been?
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