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Aswad -> RE: Indoctrination (11/15/2012 4:42:59 PM)
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ORIGINAL: vincentML
You are overly simplifying Tweakabelle's list of criteria for developing an abstract concept, which are dependent upon the development of language.
No. The statement I disagreed with was this one:
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ORIGINAL: tweakabelle
Interestingly, as just about everyone agrees that language is a human invention, it follows that a deity must be a human invention too.
And I'm saying it doesn't hold water.
quote:
Like Kirata, you dodged her premise with a facile answer.
No, I'm pointing out that she is conflating the abstract concept of a deity, an object of discourse, with both the various concrete concepts of a deity and the underlying posited realities that the concepts relate to, and in so doing is bungling what should be the simplest job in the book: asserting that our concepts of divinity are- excluding gnosis and revelation as possibilities in her view- all human thoughts about something usually other than human in nature and probably not grasped by humans at this time if it even exists.
She's swapping the map for the terrain in her original statement, which wasn't by far the most grievous error in her post, though it was the most glaring one. I would, for instance, contend that her assertion that «language was developed far more recently than two millenia ago» (emphasis mine) is a serious factual error, but I overlooked it on the assumption she ment the opposite.
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It seems to me the concept of diety harboured by humankind and apparently no other living creatures begs the question of when and how humankind became specialized in the ability of forming complex abstraction.
Please explain to me what The concept, capital T, of deity harboured by humankind is.
Neteru, for instance, are dramatically different from Abrahamic concepts of deities.
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Can you imagine that threshold was crossed without holding hands with the development of language?
No, I expect we came to investigate certain things more closely after we started using language to pool our cognitive resources and also build on the work of those that came before us, accumulating knowledge and expanding our frame of reference to encompass more and more, so that we could eventually approach the point where we could induce highly abstract concepts. A capacity that, incidentally, peaked between two and five millenia ago, it seems. By the time atheism was conceived, the average intelligence of a well nourished and educated human being had dropped by between one and two standard deviations, yet we seem to persist in assuming that people in the past were hell-bent not on making sense of their environment, but on making nonsense of it, and that irks me somewhat.
People far smarter than us have, for a very long time, pondered the human condition and its potential analogues in the realms we cannot see, but without the tools that allow them to get lost in the pursuit of ever more efficient ways to consume the planet and its resources. It may be a bit much to ask for the humility to consider that they may have arrived at some interesting ideas along the way, even if one is not inclined to assume that their ideas about deities and divinity are observations or have objective counterparts.
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We discovered the laws of nature which allowed us to synthesize the concepts of the power grid and the computer.
That's what I said.
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Is mathematics anything more than an expression of our perception of natural relationships? Is mathematics more than an analytical process of the human mind? There is a Nature without humankind. Is there a Mathematics without humankind?
Our concept of mathematics is limited by the human mind; mathematics itself is not.
The former limitation does not appear to be limiting, incidentally, on the evidence.
Which is not to say that it isn't, just that we haven't seen evidence of it.
IWYW,
— Aswad.
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