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RE: Indoctrination - 11/15/2012 1:20:39 PM   
vincentML


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quote:

Hardly, if you go back to read what I replied to, which was the logic that "our ideas about deity are expressed in language, and thus deities were invented at some point after language", which you'll hopefully agree is the sillier notion.

You are overly simplifying Tweakabelle's list of criteria for developing an abstract concept, which are dependent upon the development of language. Like Kirata, you dodged her premise with a facile answer. 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. Can you imagine that threshold was crossed without holding hands with the development of language? Are there any living examples? Mute, humanlike creatures who worship a diety [excluding monks who have taken a vow of silence of course ]

quote:

It's not a matter of preference.

We didn't invent mathematics; we discovered it.

We didn't discover the power grid and the computer; we invented them.

We discovered the laws of nature which allowed us to synthesize the concepts of the power grid and the computer. 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?

< Message edited by vincentML -- 11/15/2012 1:21:41 PM >

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RE: Indoctrination - 11/15/2012 1:25:46 PM   
mnottertail


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Status: offline 		developing an abstract concept, which are dependent upon the development of language.

as a baby, I cry and am rewarded with tit, diaper changing or coddling.     I can learn to judge pretty and interesting, peek a boo,  animals are different than humans and all sorts of things before I talk, or walk or develop.  The sound of the 'Tits' voice.

Many many abstract concepts develop before language.  Epic Fail. 

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RE: Indoctrination - 11/15/2012 1:31:46 PM   
vincentML


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quote:

ORIGINAL: mnottertail

developing an abstract concept, which are dependent upon the development of language.

as a baby, I cry and am rewarded with tit, diaper changing or coddling.     I can learn to judge pretty and interesting, peek a boo,  animals are different than humans and all sorts of things before I talk, or walk or develop.  The sound of the 'Tits' voice.

Many many abstract concepts develop before language.  Epic Fail. 

Abstract concepts? Only in your dreams now that you are grown and horny
Stimulus and response on a primative level more likely.
Additionally, children are assimilating language structure and content from the adults in their environment early on.
Many many abstract concepts before language? I think not, Ron.

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RE: Indoctrination - 11/15/2012 1:35:33 PM   
mnottertail


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Status: offline 		I think so.   Can they tell the difference between mom's tit and a studebaker?  Or is it explained to them?


The idea of a god is a stimulus and a response if you have to use language to explain it.  DUCY?

< Message edited by mnottertail -- 11/15/2012 1:36:36 PM >

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RE: Indoctrination - 11/15/2012 1:49:52 PM   
PeonForHer


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quote:

ORIGINAL: mnottertail

I think so.   Can they tell the difference between mom's tit and a studebaker?  Or is it explained to them?


The idea of a god is a stimulus and a response if you have to use language to explain it.  DUCY?


I think you're pushing it a bit, Ron. The average dandelion 'knows' that it's daytime or night-time in some very rudimentary sense of the word 'know', but I think it might be going a bit far to say that it has 'developed an abstract concept' about the matter.

ETA: Come to think of it, my electric cooker could be said to 'know' that it has to turn a ring on when I turn the relevant knob. But maybe I'm pushing things too far the opposite way here.


< Message edited by PeonForHer -- 11/15/2012 1:55:45 PM >

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RE: Indoctrination - 11/15/2012 1:50:28 PM   
mnottertail


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RE: Indoctrination - 11/15/2012 1:53:08 PM   
PeonForHer


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quote:

ORIGINAL: freedomdwarf1


quote:

ORIGINAL: PeonForHer


quote:

ORIGINAL: freedomdwarf1

Apart from the fact that there are still some small groups and civilisations in the world that have no language and still have a belief system, let me tell you the story that was aired on the History channel some years ago.



What? Where? That's pretty damned surprising - or do those words 'civilisations' and 'system' have an unusual meaning?


What: Tribes in recent discoveries that have had little or no previous interaction with the civilised world.

Where: Amazon, Borneo and a few other places that haven't been extensively infiltrated by the western world.

I'm using the word 'civilisation' to describe small, discreet, individual groups of peoples who have hitherto managed to avoid being discovered or otherwise influenced by the so-called civilised world.

And 'system' to depict that a state of worship for something other than themselves (usually an idol representing something) or something physical or observable.
I deliberately did not use the word 'god' or deity in that description because many have such a blinkered point of view they don't see the wider picture. To those that worship or hold in severe reverence a something is indeed a belief system even if it doesn't meet with your own definition of what a 'belief' is.



Far out. And these groups don't have language, either? So how do we even know that they have belief systems - how did they communicate that? Fascinating stuff, FD!

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RE: Indoctrination - 11/15/2012 2:36:17 PM   
freedomdwarf1


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quote:

ORIGINAL: PeonForHer
Far out. And these groups don't have language, either? So how do we even know that they have belief systems - how did they communicate that? Fascinating stuff, FD!


We know they have a belief system because their behaviour can be directly observed.
At a set time/day they all congregate around an idol (or whatever) and they meditate, or dance.... etc.
Whatever form of 'worship' they use is something they don't do at any other times and also is a deliberate act that takes some cognitive and abstract thought to organise or contrive and it is a collective process rather than just some individual.

That shows they have a severe reverence for who or whatever they are defering to as having some sort of 'higher' means than they themselves give credence to.

Worship, of whatever form, is something that can be attributed to (and especially when applied to more than an individual) as belonging to what we call 'a belief system'. You might not like what that belief is or even be able to comprehend it or it's base. And just because it's not your belief or something you can relate to doesn't make it any less of a belief of some sort.

And this can (and has been) done without any formal language of those engaged in that belief.
You don't actually need a formal language (ie, words) to convey the meaning of a belief.


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RE: Indoctrination - 11/15/2012 3:21:52 PM   
ToyOfRhamnusia


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quote:

ORIGINAL: freedomdwarf1


quote:

ORIGINAL: ToyOfRhamnusia
It still stands that humans cannot explain the properties of a deity to each other without the use of language.


Ah!
So you think it's not at all possible to have a belief system without language?

Apart from the fact that there are still some small groups and civilisations in the world that have no language and still have a belief system, let me tell you the story that was aired on the History channel some years ago.

When some nutty explorer first started exploring bits of the Amazon by air in the early days of film, they happened upon a small group of natives. They landed and filmed them in their natural habitat. The comentary cleary stated that this tribe didn't appear to have any formal means of communication beyond the odd grunt and pointy gestures. Several months later they re-visited the tribe. Lo and behold, the tribe had built a mock-up of the plane out of twigs and straw and were performing some sort of worship to it. The film crew still stated that the tribe had no formal communication skills beyond what they had observed on the first vist yet the whole tribe were now worshipping the mock-up of the plane.
So, it only takes one tribesman to point skywards and go "UGG" and the meaning is conveyed - yet they have NO LANGUAGE at all.
Obviously the worshipping of the plane ceased over a period of time as the tribe were exposed to 'the civilised world'. But for some decades, that effigy of the plane was the centre of worship - to them, it was a deity or a god because they hadn't seen anything in the sky except the sun and the stars.

Language, or at least a formal one, is not required to convey a belief system between people.
If you can point, go "UGG" and draw pictures in the sand with a stick, you can convey a lot of meaning without any formal language whatsoever.


That's not what I said.

I said that you can't have an ORGANIZED belief system that you can share among other people too. If you can't communicate your beliefs, how can you then be sure that the other people believe in the same as you do?

And how can you tell the difference between "God" and "Zeus" with a stick in the and, without using language???

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RE: Indoctrination - 11/15/2012 3:23:22 PM   
Kirata


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quote:

ORIGINAL: vincentML

Like Kirata, you dodged her premise with a facile answer.

She didn't post a premise, she posted a bald claim. And it wasn't dodged, it was discredited. That she declines to acknowledge that is another matter, as is her attempt to force upon any response a set of criteria that rule out any conclusion except the one she is willing to accept. It's the typical lose-lose proposition, dear to the heart of charlatans and shell-game hucksters everywhere, and not dissimilar in kind from its more popular cousin, which demands that proof of a non-physical reality be furnished by our method for exploring physical reality. Get yourselves a new playbook.

K.

< Message edited by Kirata -- 11/15/2012 3:34:49 PM >

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RE: Indoctrination - 11/15/2012 4:19:18 PM   
tweakabelle


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quote:

ORIGINAL: freedomdwarf1

If you believe it to be BS, that is your opinion and you are entitled to it.
And whilst you keep insisting on pointing to those 'cargo plane' incidents, I am categorically saying it wasn't such an event.

What I was refering to wasn't a 'cargo plane' episode but one of exploration - deliberate, planned exploration.
The fact that it was featured on a channel not exactly renown for it's fictional content, I would prefer to think of it as more factual than fictional.



It would help your case greatly if you could produce some link to this evidence.

Asking others to rely on your memory of an old film is not the most convincing position. And I would certainly like to see the original evidence before evaluating it.

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RE: Indoctrination - 11/15/2012 4:20:11 PM   
PeonForHer


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quote:

ORIGINAL: freedomdwarf1


quote:

ORIGINAL: PeonForHer
Far out. And these groups don't have language, either? So how do we even know that they have belief systems - how did they communicate that? Fascinating stuff, FD!


We know they have a belief system because their behaviour can be directly observed. [Etc.]


This is really interesting. It's not easy for me to imagine a civilisation of any description that doesn't use language. Hell, it's not easy for me to imagine a group of humans of any kind that doesn't use a language. Could you provide (a) link(s)? Thanks in advance if so.


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RE: Indoctrination - 11/15/2012 4:25:32 PM   
PeonForHer


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quote:

ORIGINAL: mnottertail

Well then, lets go straight to cave paintings, if there is some cavil with this.


Damnit, Ron - this is the third time this week that someone has asked a question to which I'd dearly like to know the answer, the better to understand a position that's so different from my own, only to be told 'It's splitting hairs', or 'If you don't know I can't tell you', or (the equivalent of) 'Fuck off - you're just trying to trap me'. Or similar. So for the third time this week, I've felt, '*Sigh* - so near, but so far'.

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RE: Indoctrination - 11/15/2012 4:35:58 PM   
tweakabelle


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quote:

ORIGINAL: Kirata


quote:

ORIGINAL: vincentML

Like Kirata, you dodged her premise with a facile answer.

She didn't post a premise, she posted a bald claim. And it wasn't dodged, it was discredited. That she declines to acknowledge that is another matter, as is her attempt to force upon any response a set of criteria that rule out any conclusion except the one she is willing to accept. It's the typical lose-lose proposition, dear to the heart of charlatans and shell-game hucksters everywhere, and not dissimilar in kind from its more popular cousin, which demands that proof of a non-physical reality be furnished by our method for exploring physical reality. Get yourselves a new playbook.

K.

I posted a claim - that a concept such as a deity is inconceivable outside of language - which K chose to dispute. He advanced no evidence other than wishy washy generalisations and sentimental tosh. He was asked to specify the process where the concept of a deity was produced outside language - he failed to do so. He was asked to show one example to support his claim - he failed to do so.

Finally I listed some of the criteria I claim must be present before a concept such as a deity is conceivable - his response was to lambast me for "the absurdity of your demand for a purely rational explication of a way of experiencing the world that is intuitive and holistic" when I was making no such demand. "The absurdity of the .... rational ....." hmmmmm, his words not mine.

At no stage did he produce anything serious to counter my position other what might generously be described as his own opinions (and there are various opinions as to the gravitas of those). My feeling is that the only things discredited were K's position and his reputation - and he did all the damage himself.

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RE: Indoctrination - 11/15/2012 4:42:59 PM   
Aswad


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quote:

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:

quote:

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.

quote:

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.

quote:

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.

quote:

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.

quote:

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.


_____________________________

"If God saw what any of us did that night, he didn't seem to mind.
From then on I knew: God doesn't make the world this way.
We do." -- Rorschack, Watchmen.


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RE: Indoctrination - 11/15/2012 4:45:53 PM   
Aswad


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quote:

ORIGINAL: PeonForHer

this is the third time this week that someone has asked a question to which I'd dearly like to know the answer, the better to understand a position that's so different from my own


What's your question, Peon?

IWYW,
— Aswad.


_____________________________

"If God saw what any of us did that night, he didn't seem to mind.
From then on I knew: God doesn't make the world this way.
We do." -- Rorschack, Watchmen.


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Profile   Post #: 176
RE: Indoctrination - 11/15/2012 4:48:13 PM   
tweakabelle


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quote:

ORIGINAL: Aswad

quote:

ORIGINAL: vincentML

Math was invented by trees then?


No. It was discovered (not invented) by humans.

1+e^(πi)=0 would hold true without us knowing it.

IWYW,
— Aswad.


Aswad, maths can be seen as an symbolic language too. The formula 1+e^(πi)=0 is meaningless unless we agree what the symbols represent in advance, maths relies on a system of shared meaning. The are rules that govern the construction of mathematical statements (syntax and grammar) and a semantics too (eg the square root of -1).

'Trees have green leaves' or 'it snows in cold climates' would hold true without us knowing it.

So I'm not sure what your point is.

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RE: Indoctrination - 11/15/2012 4:51:25 PM   
PeonForHer


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You know, I have a horrible sense that this thread will go the way of so many before it. *Just* at the point when someone *could* give a response that helps the other side to understand, instead, that someone gives a response that just parries the question.

Folks - and in my full admission that I can be as tricksy as anyone - at this point, shall we agree to a bit of irony-free, no-tricks questions, and no-tricks answers? Honesty, sincerity - that kind of thing? I mean, fuck it, it's worth a try for the novelty value alone, eh, no?

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RE: Indoctrination - 11/15/2012 4:54:49 PM   
Aswad


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quote:

ORIGINAL: tweakabelle

Aswad, maths can be seen as an symbolic language too.


The language of math is certainly symbolic.

Its reality, not so much.

quote:

The formula 1+e^(πi)=0 is meaningless unless we agree what the symbols represent in advance,


The formula, certainly.

The relation, however, holds regardless.

quote:

maths relies on a system of shared meaning.


Communicating math requires a system of shared expression.

quote:

So I'm not sure what your point is.


My point, in the quoted post, was to inform vincentML that math was not invented by trees, and that humans discovered math (e.g. the properties of addition, the ratio between the diameter and circumference of a circle, etc.) and expanded human languages to encompass a pluggable sublanguage that could be used to communicate about math. He asked a certain kind of question and got a certain kind of answer.

IWYW,
— Aswad.


_____________________________

"If God saw what any of us did that night, he didn't seem to mind.
From then on I knew: God doesn't make the world this way.
We do." -- Rorschack, Watchmen.


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Profile   Post #: 179
RE: Indoctrination - 11/15/2012 4:56:07 PM   
Aswad


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Status: offline 		That's why I asked you what your question is, Peon.

My apologies if post #179 wasn't in the spirit you're asking for; it was posted before your request.

IWYW,
— Aswad.


_____________________________

"If God saw what any of us did that night, he didn't seem to mind.
From then on I knew: God doesn't make the world this way.
We do." -- Rorschack, Watchmen.


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Profile   Post #: 180
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