I’m nitpicky about the word “believe”. So let me rephrase: I do not believe. Either I know, or I don’t know. Everything else are more or less informed speculations, assumptions or hypotheses at best.
I do not believe. Either I know, or I don’t know.
You know things but do not accept them to be true or real?
how do you know you know?
Cogito ergo sum.
Accepting a common framework of provable, i.e., measurable, repeatable, falsifiable phenomena, as a concept of “reality,” seems to be a pragmatic approach, given my sensory inputs and the processing results of my brain. This is then “knowledge.”
But ultimately, this is subordinated to the possibility of an illusion – be it like in The Matrix, or as a Boltzmann brain, or whatever. Unless there is evidence for that, it appears most practical to me to go with the above, as I don’t gain anything from racking my brain about such possible illusions of reality (even though it’s fun thinking about it).
It took me longer than I’d like to think of an answer.
Maths.
Maths is good.
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I have a crackpot theory the I enjoy for the sake of enjoying it. What if our “soul” or “consciousness” is the collapse of the quantum field. Our decisions moment to moment aren’t random chance, but the unspeakable thing.
Again, pure speculation, but it’s a lot more satisfying and rewarding to live by than throwing moral responsibility to the universe.
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My understanding is that, according to the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics, everything that can happen will happen - so for every choice you’ve made, there’s an alternate timeline for every other possible choice you could have made. But it still makes no sense to claim that you could’ve acted differently in this timeline.
This many worlds thing I find that it is easier to visualise as an extra dimension with all the other dimensions within it, including time.
I agree that free will is an illusion, but have decided that because it is true it isn’t worth thinking about further.
I don’t find the “why” to be interesting, which is interesting because it is like “I” am trying to avoid further reflection on that fact which “I” also have no control over. haha
Free will and the “self” - just two sides of the same coin. You’re not free to choose, because there’s no “you” in the first place. You’re just a collection of atoms obeying the laws of physics. It makes no sense to say you could’ve done otherwise. No, you couldn’t - whatever caused you to make a decision in the first place would compel you to make the same choice every single time, no matter how many times you rewound the universe, assuming everything else stayed the same.
We do things for two reasons: either because we want to, or because we have to. There’s no freedom in being forced to do something - and you don’t get to choose your wants or don’t-wants.
A good cup of coffee and the universe does not care about existence.
And a Hard Boiled Egg
Why does the Universe have an opinion about existence?
The indomitable human spirit
Communism.
Myself and Sasquatch.
I also believe in both this Lemmy user and Sasquatch.
Only the guy in the Sasquatch suit would say this.
We got 'em. We finally got 'em.
That my dogs will aways be happy to see me
This is adorable.
No one needs more than 500sqft of living space per capital until poverty is eradicated
War is absurd and the consequence of greed and senile, old, fucked up and immoral men
Democracy doesn’t work without a limit on speech - specifically hate speech, authoritarianism, and ethnic superiority ideology
Fascism is the greatest concern of the western world right now
Genocide deserves instant disavowal and should convince any sane person to immediately support removing any government official or politician from office who doesn’t oppose it
Black Lives Matter, and American history has treated black Americans awfully (see prison industrial complex)
Housing isn’t an investment vehicle. Tax speculative purchasing of housing. Support government building high density housing like the HBD system in Singapore or Austria’s housing system
So 1000sqft for a couple, 1500 for a family of 3?
That seems pretty reasonable, though I’m not sure it really scales linearly. My wife and I live in appx. 1000sqft, and that’s really plenty for us. An extra 500sqft seems about right when we have a kid, but another 500 for each additional kid would be excessive.
We believe in nothing, Mr. Lebowski.
Nothing.
And tomorrow we come back and we cut off your chonson.
Aliens
What do you imagine life on other planets to look like?
I let my imagination run wild. I believe whatever society you can of, sci-fi, medieval, fantasy, steam punk, I believe it’s all out there. Waiting to be discovered. There’s got to be a planet out there filled with humans, like us, but they live in cloud cities and live intertwined with another species. The Grey’s are robots they use, like Detroit become human, as assistants. Or, there is a society where magic is the norm. They believe it’s magic but to us, it’s the manipulation of matter, powerful magnets, and transformation of states of matter.
Anything better than our boring, 9-5, money based, car dependant society.
That the US is far beyond fixing itself nonviolently.
Violence is always necessary when dealing with dogs that can’t talk, only bite. And Americans are easily some of the most violent people on Earth, so the worry isn’t there, it’s that once again someone will use that anger to fuel their violent actions but will direct it once more against the innocent. Also, the cops would never allow it, they’re even worse dogs, lol, and would definitely have to be put down before anything.
Honestly, I can’t see America becoming anything but a hwite ethnonationalist dictatorship. The lost and the stupid yearn for a messiah and will never even consider putting in the mental work so they would rather leave it all in the hands of an appealing character, and Americans know too little about the world to give it to anyone with a shred of decency and competence.
Believing in something seems to imply thinking something to be true without having evidence for it - otherwise it would be knowledge, a justified true belief. So I know a couple things, like that I exist as a conscious being, and have practical empirical knowledge of the rest of the sensory world too.
have practical empirical knowledge of the rest of the sensory world too.
Oho, that’s a pretty bold statement of belief for someone who can’t prove they’re not a brain in a vat!
More seriously though, there are tons of things that have conflicting evidence or are simply too big or complex to have enough evidence to have definitive proof for, yet we still have to make decisions about them. Like believing that X vs Y is a better governing system (eg democracy vs republic). Or what about questions that aren’t related to proof, like defining and living by ethical standards? Yet most people still find value in “moral” things, and believe that people should do “good” instead of “bad”.
What you just uttered is a totally valid belief in my eyes :)
Beliefs don’t always have to be based on mere intuition alone. It’s totally fine to be able to back up what one believes with arguments.
Believe means to accept as true or real, and does not define the precondition to the belief.
How can you prove that you exist as a conscious being?
How can you prove that your senses can be trusted?
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I am thinking about whether I exist as a conscious being. Therefore there must be an ‘I’ to be thinking that.
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I can’t prove that my senses can be trusted with 100% certainty to tell me truth - in fact I can prove the opposite with things like optical illusions. However, when interacting with the world that I only know is real through my senses, basing my behaviour on those same senses that let me know the world exists seems reasonable to me. That’s what I call practical knowledge, rather than true knowledge.
How do you define “I”?
In other words you believe what your senses tell you to be real even though you cannot objectively prove your senses to be trustworthy?
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A theory I’ve been working on lately is that our worldview rests on certain foundational beliefs - beliefs that can’t be objectively proven or disproven. We don’t arrive at them through reason alone but end up adopting the one that feels intuitively true to us, almost as if it chooses us rather than the other way around. One example is the belief in whether or not a god exists. That question sits at the root of a person’s worldview, and everything else tends to flow logically from it. You can’t meaningfully claim to believe in God and then live as if He doesn’t exist - the structure has to be internally consistent.
That’s why I find it mostly futile to argue about downstream issues like abortion with someone whose core belief system is fundamentally different. It’s like chipping away at the chimney when the foundation is what really holds everything up. If the foundation shifts, the rest tends to collapse on its own.
So in other words: even if we agree on the facts, we may still arrive at different conclusions because of our beliefs. When it comes to knowledge, there’s only one thing I see as undeniably true - and you probably agree with me on this: my consciousness, the fact of subjective experience. Everything else is up for debate - and I truly mean everything.
Maybe a god’s existence is a core belief for some people, but it shouldn’t be. There shouldn’t be anything you believe without a logical reason to.
“Why is there something rather than nothing?” is a valid question - and the idea that something created it isn’t entirely unthinkable. The point is that you can’t prove or disprove it. Not believing in God is just as much a foundational belief as believing in one. Most of what you think is built on these core beliefs - the kind that, if proven wrong, would effectively collapse your entire worldview.
What i don’t get here is what the existence of a “creator” would have to do with abortion. Just as an example, what if there is a god. What does that tell us about everyday life, or about abortion?
It would be very well conceivable to me that there is a god, but they have no opinion about whether we do abortions or not. How are these things connected?
Ok, let’s take a step backwards. How are you defining ‘god’?
Personally, I consider it synonymous with “creator,” but even if someone believes in a biblical God, that’s beside the point. While the idea of a biblical God is an entirely unconvincing concept to me, I still give it - or something like it - a greater-than-zero chance of actually existing. I can’t prove otherwise.
Another example of a belief like that would be belief in the physical world around you. You could be dreaming - or in a simulation.
So can I clarify that when you’re saying
Some people take the existence of god as a brute fact
That you mean
Some people assume that universe was created by something
?
Well, that’s not a direct quote from me, but yes - some people assume the universe was created by something. For some, that’s the person running the simulation; for others, it’s the biblical God as described in the Bible, or atleast their interpretation of it.
Only that which has evidence to support it.
How much n is enough n?
- The universe and everything in it was made for a reason.
- The message of Jesus, while deformed and deeply mixed with Western nonsense by Rome (polytheism, pagan rites and an immature disregard for self restraint, to name a few), will serve as a basis to unite the West to the rest of the world (up until now it’s behaved either as an armed landlord, a mob boss or a deranged killer, and that includes the European colonial project called Israel).
- People are fundamentally kind hearted and prosocial, but unexamined trauma, pettiness and immaturity, and an overall disregard for thought before action (a moral obligation, btw), keeps them from being who they were always supposed to be.
- Hard labels don’t/rarely belong in this world, and never apply to people. If you wanna understand the universe and the people in it you’re gonna have to understand them as a collection of spectrums/ranges, not as singular adjectives and nouns that are either meaningless or overly exaggerated.
do you believe that randomness exists?
The universe and everything in it was made for a reason.
I wonder how randomness would fit into this. I believe that randomness does exist and that order/causality has its limits.
Randomness? Or uncertainty? Cause I understand uncertainty (both epistemologically and physically, and more so the former than the latter), but it’s hard for me to understand randomness when everything comes from something that came before, forming a line of causes and effects (knowable and unknowable) from the beginning of the universe until today. Perhaps through quantum physics, idk, but I don’t think I need to understand it as long as I only take into consideration what happens after the collapse of the wave function, lol. I also understand that consciousness is a black box, and free will is evidently real (go diet or be faithful in your teenage yours, you’ll quickly discover your freedom as you’re fighting yourself) but is axiomatic and cannot be properly explained in words (it’s part of the terrain that cannot be represented in the map).
I have read the following very beautiful explanation of randomness:
You may very well assume that the universe is deterministic, i.e. one thing follows after another, but even if that is so, you still end up with infinitely many stars in the night sky, and you cannot predict their patterns and shapes from mere computational-prediction alone. You need to venture out into the night and see the stars for yourself in order to find their arrangement and yourself in the middle of it. That is what randomness is all about: The stars could have any pattern, but they have exactly one. The same applies for humans: Humans could have any character, but they have exactly one. The true human character causes free-will, and that is what you and me experience as the wonder of life.
That is beautiful indeed. 😊❤️
