Political Philosophy discussion

[Toffer90]

Scientific methods is a product of reason, a lot of things are products of reason.
Rationality is something far more fundamental, and it is absolute.
Rationality is to be open for the possibility that you are wrong, even about that which has been proven by reason.
Irrationality is the opposite, to consider something that cannot be proven as an irrefutable fact.

Rationality employ reason to arrive at what is right or wrong, what is proven and what's not.
The rational mind is open to the possibility that what is proven can be disproved, exactly because it is a rational mind, for if something that is proven, is proven to be falsely proven, then that has to be enough for the rational mind.
The irrational mind take something that is not proven, and tries to force reality to work according to said something being right, this is called faith.
The rational mind can believe things to be proven, or just believe in general, but will not try to force the belief into existence like the irrational mind would, adapting life to reality through what one think is proven is not irrational though, not having doubt about what one think is proven is.
Organized religion is a product of irrationality, reason may have been involved in its production, but it was probably ignored selectively too.

What seems reasonable may change with the times, the subjective side of humanity at play, reason itself though, the more objective root of what that is, must be abandoned at some point to reach irrationality.

Edit: I'm open to me being wrong about this, as I believe it to be right, but not as an irrefutable fact, because then I would have to consider myself irrational because of it. ^^
A lot about humanity and modern society is irrational, we are not perfect beings, we are simply trying our best to employ our imperfect reason.

 

[Yudishtira]

Irrationality is to consider as fact something that has been disproven. That which cannot be proven generally cannot be disproven either, meaning it is beyond the scope of rationality.

Love, friendship, community, altruism, optimism - are virtues rational or irrational? Can you even establish the value of reason by reason alone?

 

[Toffer90]

Love, friendship, community, altruism, optimism - are virtues rational or irrational? Can you even establish the value of reason by reason alone?

Affections are neither rational nor irrational. If your love is based on reason, then I would argue that you are mistaking love for something else.

The value of reason? That is a subjective thing, there's value in irrationality too as value is a subjective phenomena.

Actions can be irrational, e.g. if you take vengeance upon someone because you suspect your spouse has cheated on you, either you take said vengeance out on the spouse or whatever third party you think was involved, it would be an act of affection, jealousy caused by love, and you may have punished an innocent person. The rational thing would be to offer it the benefit of the doubt, calm down before acting on it at all which may allow you to act more rationally.

 

[Yudishtira]

The belief in God or gods is not irrational (or rational). The belief that God(s) do not exist is not rational (or irrational). If one is religious, then so is the other. Neither can be proven or disproven.

Neither is incompatible with science or the scientific method. They are beyond the scope of both.

 

[Toffer90]

The belief in God or gods is not irrational (or rational).

Never said it was connected. At the base of things, actions are what is rational or irrational, by extension, an individual who acts irrational can thus also be irrational. Being irrational is not necessarily a problem, depends on what harm said irrational actions do. Most people are irrational in one way or another.

Punishing, manipulating, harassing, etc., someone for not believing the same as you is irrational, if a religious person keeps his belief private, there is little irrational about that persons belief.
The act of thinking something, whatever that something is, is not in itself irrational, regardless of what the thought was about. Belief is at its base just a thought in your head.

Neither is incompatible with science or the scientific method. They are beyond the scope of both.

Faith is incompatible with the scientific method, if the conclusion is not based on reason then it's just a gut feeling, an assertion (as if no supporting evidence were necessary), and therefore the conclusion cannot be said to be derived from the scientific method.

 

[Blazenclaw]

The belief in God or gods is not irrational (or rational). The belief that God(s) do not exist is not rational (or irrational). If one is religious, then so is the other. Neither can be proven or disproven.

There is a difference between a hypothesis that makes claims (there exists some God or Gods which have taken defined actions) and what is effectively the null hypothesis (no difference exists from random noise). If someone claims that a deity named Bob created the universe last Thursday and it will run for another week before Bob closes the simulation, then if next Friday rolls around then this belief in Bob as stated is disproven.

A belief that there exists some quantity which cannot be tested nor verified in any manner is by inherent nature one for which there can be no interaction with. Consider the classification of afterlife beliefs. Either A) it is possible to return, in which case it is testable in some form and can in theory be disproven, or B) passing into an afterlife represents a one-way barrier for which there has not and cannot be any return. In the latter case it is impossible for us to have any information in any form whatsoever about said afterlife (the implications of which should be somewhat obvious), while in the former, the inverse of any claimed interaction would indicate the claim as stated to be false.

Believing in a defined claim that contradicts observed/interactable reality (Bob did end the universe this last Thursday!) is irrational by definition. In this sense, I guess you could say my personal belief is akin to Occam's Razor - the more complex a belief is, requiring a greater number of untestable claims - the less likely it is to be true as compared to the null hypothesis (no defined claim/no individual creator), and closer to something I'd call irrational (because near all things exist on a spectrum). If there is a creation deity, it's not one that had a form similar to humans that only interacted in our past that also H and I and J and K and... etc.

 

[Pepo]

@Toffer90 I do not disagree with your position except for semantics. I cannot say that keeping an open mind is either rational or not, but I consider tolerance to others position one of the highest virtues. What you refer as rationality it can be cosidered exactly that: to don't force one beliefs into another . However, and what I'm arguing against, is that we can't separate things as rational and irrational. Even on extreme cases like religious ultra-fundamentalist or the flat-earthers a type of reason operate, despite how alien may it seen to us. Also organized religion is probably one of the shining examples of the spirit of the time: their constitution is far from irrational, and the beliefs of the different world religions are deeply asociated with their historical context.

 

[Joij21]

Also organized religion is probably one of the shining examples of the spirit of the time: their constitution is far from irrational, and the beliefs of the different world religions are deeply asociated with their historical context.

You sound like a social conservative when you say that.

or that democracy is a superior form of government

And your questioning of democracy makes you sound like a Russian.

 

[Pepo]

And your questioning of democracy makes you sound like a Russian.

The 80's are calling, they want your cold war back.

Please let not use nationalities as an insult, it is a very ignorant practice and a very dangerous one and in essence it is the same as the social ills of racism or sexism. If you disagree with one's statement , critic their reasoning of it, but do not use practices like that one.

 

[Joij21]

The 80's are calling, they want your cold war back.

Please let not use nationalities as an insult, it is a very ignorant practice and a very dangerous one and in essence it is the same as the social ills of racism or sexism. If you disagree with one's statement , critic their reasoning of it, but do not use practices like that one.

Then what do you think is a good alternative to democracy? Dictatorship?

 

[tmv]

A belief that there exists some quantity which cannot be tested nor verified in any manner is by inherent nature one for which there can be no interaction with.

And yet, it can still be a part of science: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wave_function

 

[Toffer90]

If something is not verified in science it would only be an hypothesis (axiom, postulate, assumption) and not yet qualify as theory (theory, in acedemia, is something that has been verified).

Complex (also called imaginary) numbers and space is indeed used in science, we have no idea how to describe what these things represent in reality, there is no way to measure the imaginary number anywhere, or take a picture of imaginary space, as they are an extreme abstraction of reality, but we have tested and verified that it can be applied mathematically to solve real problems. The wave function is not an observable quantity, one could say it describes the entire space-time motion of a particle within a given finite system, however, the integral of the wave function does have a physical significance.
Quantum mechanics and imaginary math is too abstract for science to really explain in a concrete way, they are tools that we have discovered and which we can only understand, and barely so, in an intellectual sense.

The quantum wave function is important in the field of nanotechnology, it can be used to understand and predict the behavior of electrons in materials when the material is scaled down to nanometer scales, at that scale particles starts to behave differently due to things like quantum interference and material phonons becoming a significant factor. In other words, it is part of our toolset to understand the electrical properties of materials on the nanoscale.

If there is no wave function that can be applied to a specific particle problem, then science won't insist that it should work, just like it wouldn't take you long to figure out that a hammer is the wrong tool to brush your teeth with if you for some reason expected it to be the right tool. Verification is the cornerstone of science, even though some experimental scientist have weird ideas sometimes that never lead anywhere. ^^

 

[Thunderbrd]

I can also determine that a hammer is the WRONG tool to brush your teeth without having to run an independent test either. This happens through the mysterious process of reasoning. Somehow, I just KNOW that would be a very very VERY bad idea.

 

[Blazenclaw]

And yet, it can still be a part of science: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wave_function

To add to Toffer's response, I suspect you have either A) have a misunderstanding of what I wrote ("A belief that there exists some quantity which cannot be tested"; QM does possess hidden information [ex: Uncertainty Principle] yet that hypothesis of how reality works has been verified and the mechanics understood easily [ex: Dual-Slit Experiment]), or B) a misunderstanding of the example you chose (the wave function is usually introduced in the first semester of any introductory Quantum course, which is to say it is very well understood; I am a physicist by education, even if I took the cowards way out and bailed from academia in favor of industry).

I'd also define 'verified' in Toffer's response as something that no human has been able to disprove beyond reasonable suspicion; we typically cannot prove in the affirmative, but if nobody can find a counterexample or introduced contradiction after many thousands of cumulative human-years of research, it generally moves to status of Theory rather than hypothesis. Of course Theories may be proven wrong or incomplete later (Newtonian Mechanics - standing for hundreds of real-years - were explicitly shown to be incomplete by Special Relativity, Quantum Mechanics in the 1900s)... and that right there is the distinct difference between science and religion; the Scientific Method is not a Belief, not a Religion akin to others, it is a Method by which Reality may be communally agreed upon, not something that must be taken on faith. Science is that which may yet prove itself wrong, but hasn't.

 

[Pepo]

Then what do you think is a good alternative to democracy? Dictatorship?

I wasn't saying that democracy was a bad form of goverment, what I was implying was that it requieres that people believe in it to work. What we are seeing in the US I think is a proof of that: there is a significant group of people that currently doesn't believe in their institutions ( and just to be clear, I do not support their acts or their worldview in any way). While other forms of goverments usually relay on a significant use of intimidatory force, Democracy relay less on it in part because people have an easier time in trusting their goverment. If this trust or faith is lost, we usually see efforts to either renovate the institutions in a still a democratic enviroment ; or their replacement by others forms of goverments. And for the record, I do think that our system has serious flaws, and needs to be changed, but in order to ensure a much bigger role on politics and decision making by the people, instead of letting it rest on a few representatives.

@Blazenclaw And yet we see people who has faith in Science. I do not think that Science and Religion are directly comparable: while science is a method for understanding reality, while religion comes from our subjective (yet not individual) perception. Believing on a higher being is not incompatible with taking part in expanding our knowlegde of the world thougth science.

 

[Toffer90]

And yet we see people who has faith in Science.

You thinking about the techno-optimists, who think all our problems will be solved by science and therefore there's no reason to worry/care about the big problems of our time, like plastic in nature, mass extinction of other species, and global warming? Yeah, that's a common irrationality of today, but it is often just a secondary one caused by the faith in eternal economic growth within finite time and space, which is a more dangerous irrationality imo.

Edit: Maybe you're just referring to the trivial case that many people take science seriously without understanding the evidence for it in many cases.

 

[tmv]

To add to Toffer's response, I suspect you have either A) have a misunderstanding of what I wrote ("A belief that there exists some quantity which cannot be tested"; QM does possess hidden information [ex: Uncertainty Principle] yet that hypothesis of how reality works has been verified and the mechanics understood easily [ex: Dual-Slit Experiment]), or B) a misunderstanding of the example you chose (the wave function is usually introduced in the first semester of any introductory Quantum course, which is to say it is very well understood; I am a physicist by education, even if I took the cowards way out and bailed from academia in favor of industry).

I'd also define 'verified' in Toffer's response as something that no human has been able to disprove beyond reasonable suspicion; we typically cannot prove in the affirmative, but if nobody can find a counterexample or introduced contradiction after many thousands of cumulative human-years of research, it generally moves to status of Theory rather than hypothesis. Of course Theories may be proven wrong or incomplete later (Newtonian Mechanics - standing for hundreds of real-years - were explicitly shown to be incomplete by Special Relativity, Quantum Mechanics in the 1900s)... and that right there is the distinct difference between science and religion; the Scientific Method is not a Belief, not a Religion akin to others, it is a Method by which Reality may be communally agreed upon, not something that must be taken on faith. Science is that which may yet prove itself wrong, but hasn't.

Yes, I am aware of it. But what do you mean when you say "tested" in this case? We can measure Observables, but we absolutely cannot measure or observe the wave function itself. This might be one of the main reasons why we have so many https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interpretations_of_quantum_mechanics .

 

[Blazenclaw]

But what do you mean when you say "tested" in this case? We can measure Observables, but we absolutely cannot measure or observe the wave function itself.

Testing does not require direct observation in the manner you're thinking. As a rough analogy - C2C in its executable package is a ordered collection of bits. We don't observe it directly - is the first bit or the .exe a 1 or 0? - yet you and I know much about how it functions when read by a PC. We don't know any individual wave function sure, but the mathematical/physical theory that matter behaves according to the wave function holds up in the manner we interact with it. There may be many interpretations of what the wave function means, but by definition they must differ in some regard, at which point there could exist some test to isolate which actually accurately represents the world we're in.

"A belief that there exists some quantity which cannot be tested nor verified in any manner is by inherent nature one for which there can be no interaction with."
The 'belief' here is that the wave function is a good model for how energy and matter behave in our observable universe (most strongly at quantum scales). The wave function itself may not be observable, but we can test that, indeed, energy and matter behave according to how the wave function & interactions with it predict (most notably; the normalized square represents/is a probability distribution for the governed quantity). In the same token- can you observe the concept of 'gravity' directly? No, but you sure can observe Wile E. Coyote dropping a piano and guess what's going to happen next.

If someone claims that a deity exists and cannot be verified by any means, then therefore that deity cannot be the cause of any observable effect in our reality (logically possible, if unlikely due to Occam). If they claim it exists and does cause observable effects, it's falsifiable, even if such tests or evidence may be difficult to acquire. The point of all this is to say it is logically flawed to say something exists, causes effects, and yet cannot be verified or falsified in any manner.

 

[Thunderbrd]

The point of all this is to say it is logically flawed to say something exists, causes effects, and yet cannot be verified or falsified in any manner.

If it happens at only unexpectable intervals, not to say it cannot be verified personally, but to admit it is infrequent and difficult to verify and impossible to CREATE verification, but has been experienced, is that so illogical? At least, when it has been experienced by the person saying so?

 

[raxo2222]

If it happens at only unexpectable intervals, not to say it cannot be verified personally, but to admit it is infrequent and difficult to verify and impossible to CREATE verification, but has been experienced, is that so illogical? At least, when it has been experienced by the person saying so?

Then it will be blamed on one of psychological biases.
That is equivalent of optical illusion.