Series 107: a question of external validation of reasoning
still using Robin Williams comedy routine as example from previous series of entries); my brother Spencer decides my belief of snake in hole is fostered purely from cocaine-fit; no good reason to believe snake is there; no reason to be embarrassed if snake is there after all; my rational argument to stay away from hole also ultimately untrustworthy–no anchor of rationality at beginning; no good reason for Bro to pay attention to my idea with respect to what I claimed for it; no good reason to pay attention to me on this idea; could pay attention to real character of my ‘belief’–better not let me drive the cart!; no sceptic accepts “the God Module” producing ‘belief’ in God as proper grounds for accepting God exists; foundation of belief must be rational, or judged by another initiator to be worthwhile despite non-rational foundation; Bro might draw conclusions about irrational ‘belief’ plus other evidence to justify conclusion similar to irrational ‘belief’; what difference on standard physicalist account of normal belief formation?; no difference, still non-rational; true to the fact from which it directly results, but still non-rational (or ‘irrational’ if happening to normally rational entity); Bro’s rational verification of my ir-or-non-rational belief, does not make my belief rational; a belief, far from being necessarily mutually exclusive to reason, can outright depend upon reasoning; faith always involves some kind of belief; thus religious faith may be based on reasoning, and can be more worth paying attention to insofar as reasoning is involved; (other far-reaching implications from discussion of belief-formation, deferred until Series 200)
(wave at Jeff!); even simple math statements would be ultimately unreliable if infinite regression is true; reasons deploying or appealing to an infinite regression (such as against Christianity or atheism being true) would also be ultimately unreliable if infinite regression is true; also, inf-reg proposals end up necessarily implying a final explanatory fact after all; turtles all the way down (for example) must be turtles all the way down and not even possibly explainable in terms of something else more fundamentally basic; an infinite regress must be self-existently what it is and there is an end to it; but that’s an Independent Fact, not an infinite regress; infinite regressors must make tacit exception against infinite regression being true, even to try to seriously propose or appeal to it as true; the IF (including any supposed ‘infinite regression’) cannot be explainable by further appeal to something else; a deployment of this concept by philosophical naturalists against a too-simple supernaturalistic argument; the too simple supernat argument tacitly assumes that anything we can ask the question of origin about, must have an origin instead of being self-existent; naturalists rightly complain that this leads to an infinite regression unless the too-simple supernaturalist cheats in his own favor; no escape for infinite regression by this route either: how did infinite regression “come to exist”?; we end up, whichever way we go, explicitly or implicitly requiring the existence of an ultimate Fact that is not dependent on anything else, and so is not caused by anything else; infinite regressor complains that uncaused cause is contradiction, thus no worse than his own position; uncaused causation may in fact be self-contradictory proposal; self-causing causation, however, is not; the principle difference between privative and positive aseity; at least one non-contradictory option, therefore; (but leaving aside final decision between privative and positive aseity until later); various ways different philosophies agree with existence of an Independent Fact; but how far can they be in agreement with each other?