Submitted by thelivingphilosophy t3_yt6m03 in philosophy
Reply to comment by DarkMarxSoul in A cross between an Existentialist and an Old Testament prophet, Danish philosopher Soren Kierkegaard urged his "single individual" reader to follow the "highest passion" of faith rather than becoming one of the stereotyped pseudo-individuals of "The Crowd" by thelivingphilosophy
Eh... we'll oppose.
We don't see faith as a matter of speculation; we consider faith a matter of trusting what is felt rather than granting the premise of what one fears.
More precisely, faith must be based on subjective experience; knowledge is based on what other people experienced... and since people practice lying when they feel afraid, what they communicate has to be verified to be trusted.
Faith is understood internally, not verified (edit: decided) externally.To a process that can only occur through one path, the other may look like madness.
Just want to point out human memory is notoriously inaccurate, and its completely possible to decieve yourself. Kinda puts a hole in the subjective experience bedrock from my perspective. (Also that definition of knowledge is rather suspect)
Faith appears to me as a tautology. Somthing you need inorder to maintain.
You are 100% accurate but many here don’t seem to understand basic logic as much as they love the mental masturbation of philosophical pondering
||Just want to point out human memory is notoriously inaccurate,||
Most are. Some people are afflicted with videographic memory. Don't assume your experience is universal.
|| its completely possible to decieve yourself. ||
You say this as if people don't lie to each other all the time. If "filtering the conclusions against reasonable considerations" is a factor when listening to others, then it may be presumed to be a factor when listening to the self.
As such, the observation about deceit is not relevant, is it?
||Faith appears to me as a tautology.||
Faith in your subjective experience has been this way. Ours approach differs. ~shrug~ Until you understand how we see it, your perspective is based off of just one way of looking at things, innit?
Since you could be deceiving yourself... might make sense to check.
> You say this as if people don't lie to each other all the time.
You say this as though Special K didn't assume the burden of explaining why his faith stuff was special. But he did. By pointing out that self-deception can play the same role in his secret sauce as it does in the stuff he's declaring inferior, a relevant challenge is made.
>Faith in your subjective experience has been this way.
And so then Special K is faced with explaining why the subjective experience of someone who's concluded that faith isn't special, and is actually rather stupid and toxic, is somehow wrong and invalid.
He doesn't do that, though. Instead, he runs away from the argument and retreats to the safety of the choir he wants to preach to.
>You say this as though Special K didn't assume
Whups... We're not talking about Soren K. - never read him, wouldn't be able to offer any informed insight.
We were talking about faith not being a matter of speculative reasoning, rather of observed realities, in response to a comment.
The person we responded to was less interested in discussion & more impressed with their own absolute vision of reality. Since we found that incompatible with intelligent conversation, we disengaged.
Discussing faith & observable reality, that we're quite happy to kick around - cooperatively, not competitively.
The problem is that you only know what you feel, you don't know what causes that feeling in actuality or if those feelings are accurate analogues to reality. There are many things we feel that are complete fabrications or distortions of reality. Knowledge may be primarily based on the writings of others, but the power of those writings is that they meticulously document their process and ergo you can analyze that process for accuracy. For things like science experiments, you can see when those experiments have been reliably duplicated and you can duplicate them on your own id you put in the effort. That is the foundation of our science classes in school.
Faith is just feeling a thing and then arbitrarily deciding whatever you want it to be is what it is.
>The problem is that you only know what you feel, you don't know what causes that feeling in actuality or if those feelings are accurate analogues to reality.
Perhaps you only know that. Be careful asserting what others understand - you have no awareness of what they experience.
Since you just went on a paragraph & change about that exact perspective... maybe we ought to apply that approach to your statement, & start over?
||There are many things we feel that are complete fabrications or distortions of reality.||
You say that as if that's the final step. For you, it may be. For others, there may be other approaches... so you may want to slow down a little.
||Knowledge may be primarily based on the writings of others, but the power of those writings is that they meticulously document their process and ergo you can analyze that process for accuracy. ||
You're assuming they aren't lying. Since people practice lying all the time, especially to themselves (as you've just pointed out) should anyone trust what another wrote without verifying it for themselves?
||For things like science experiments, you can see when those experiments have been reliably duplicated and you can duplicate them on your own id you put in the effort. That is the foundation of our science classes in school.||
You've skipped a couple of steps - you are now equating "science" with "knowing" which is has not been established, so your statement is unsupported.
Particularly when science classes are precluded from teaching things that make "average" people emotionally uncomfortable, not because of the accuracy of the science, but because of the feelings of the people who know better.
As such, our perception of the world you describe in practice is that knowledge is dismissed by ignorant people whose feelings are disrupted by new things they are being told... because the average person is mostly disconnected from understanding what their feelings are, due to their lack of practice in managing them.
Are we understanding each other at this stage?
> Perhaps you only know that. Be careful asserting what others understand - you have no awareness of what they experience.
No, it is literally impossible for anybody to know what is causing their own experiences or if their experiences accurately reflect reality, without engaging in suitable external examination. If you're only going by your own internal experiences, by definition you cannot verify your internal experiences. Internal experiences cannot verify themselves. It is a fundamental epistemic limit and anti-philosophical to imply otherwise.
> You say that as if that's the final step. For you, it may be. For others, there may be other approaches
Every person alive is fundamentally the same kind of person and their experiences draw from the same neurological basis, unless your brain is literally broken. There is no experience that is valid for one person that is not valid for another. Either things are windows to reality we can reasonably trust, or they aren't. There is no case-by-case basis on this.
> You're assuming they aren't lying.
Yes, that's what the peer-review and reproducibility elements of the process are about. People can fabricate evidence, or they can simply make mistakes, their bias can blind them to flaws, so that means other people then step in to reproduce the results or critique the method. And, at the end of the day, if you have an issue with somebody else's writing, you can follow their method and see what happens. Nothing is ever perfect, and all "knowledge" has a degree of uncertainty, but that uncertainty is not equal for all methods or all claims.
> You've skipped a couple of steps - you are now equating "science" with "knowing"
I was using science experiments as an example of how to examine the world in predictable ways in order to establish facts about the world, I wasn't equating anything.
> As such, our perception of the world you describe in practice is that knowledge is dismissed by ignorant people whose feelings are disrupted by new things they are being told... because the average person is mostly disconnected from understanding what their feelings are, due to their lack of practice in managing them.
What ignorant people's feelings are has no bearing on whether or not faith is a valid metric for reliable truth.
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>More precisely, faith must be based on subjective experience; knowledge is based on what other people experienced.
no, knowledge is based on your own experience too unless you are claiming
next people lie to themselves via faith routinely in the millions, just look at how 80%+ of religious believers have faith in things they themselves injected into their holy texts.
faith in no way excludes lying and knowledge can be based on subjective experience.
certainty is the enemy of growth.
>no, knowledge is based on your own experience too unless you are claiming
Please repeat... you faded.
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>next people lie to themselves via faith routinely in the millions, just look at how 80%+ of religious believers have faith in things they themselves injected into their holy texts.
People lie - to themselves, to each other, constantly. This is not specific to those of faith, it also applies in science.
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>faith in no way excludes lying and knowledge can be based on subjective experience.
We define 'knowledge' as what one is told; in that context, if what you're told is a lie then it's no more "real" than any article of faith.
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>certainty is the enemy of growth.
We find your certainty in this conversation so far a bit surprising.
No, that’s nonsense. You may as well start quoting Deepak Chopra. The basic foundations of logic chop your view apart
If you can articulate how these basic foundations of logic refute our observation, that might lead to a discussion.
Right now, all you've done is make an assertion without illustrating your point, the rough equivalent of "Nuh-uh!"
So... care to be a bit more specific?
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