No but the latter is what science-minded people do. They insist that matter comes before consciousness without being able to prove it, though what’s extremely obvious in everyone’s direct experience is that consciousness is needed before anything else is said about the world. It’s a false status quo.
There is a prevelant theory but it’s still an unanswered philosophical question that noone truly intelligent would tell you they knew definitively. Anyone asserting that matter 100% comes before conciousness is on the same wavelength as someone telling you there is 100% a god controlling everything.
So we can at least agree that people who are confident in something unproveable are objectively unintelligent.
You’re wiggling a bit but let’s go with that and get to your original question.
Based on your responses, you probably hold a core belief that matter comes before consciousness. You’re smart enough to admit it’s not a certainty but you’ve probably lived your whole life fairly assured it’s the case. You speak English well so you have at least been exposed to western culture - which is very materialistic (religious or no, Christianity is also functionally materialistic), and so the core belief both serves you well, and is positively reinforced.
Any new information you get is subconsciously aligned to this core belief. Any decision you make is informed by it. You have a network of data in your head and it all connects to this and some other core beliefs. The same way a religious person can be highly logical but they hold a different core belief and so subtly, everything they know aligns to that belief. The more irrational the core belief, the more convoluted the links are of course but it makes sense to them - they just may not be able to represent it to you with the symbols that is language. And sometimes you’ll just get them doing the loading screen face when they try to rationalize their views - then it just becomes a question of which core VALUE is deeper for them; rationality or their religious view.
If rationality is more valuable, it necessarily demolishes the religious view. It demolishes a core belief to which they have aligned all their knowledge about the world. Which is a hell of a trip, and can be very scary. Which is also why rationality often loses.
Born and raised in north america, went to a baptist church as a kid so I’m fairly familiar with the bible as well as different types of religious people you’ll meet.
As an agnostic now, my only core belief is I know that I don’t know. That’s something I apply to any philosophical question so it’s alien to me that some people can separate logic and religion.
For me, I get that logic too is just models that predict things. Backwards or forwards. But it doesn’t answer what anything is. You can only EXPERIENCE what something is, but you can never accurately represent it. Because the moment you try to represent an experience, it’s not the experience itself, just a representation. So logical conclusion is that the only way to know something for sure, is to experience it as it is before any representation.
People with religious experiences may get to the ineffable truth but then they get enamored by their own attempts to represent it. They focus on the representation, instead of the experience, and they start to insist that their representation is the bestest and most correctest - because everything in their head aligns to it. Then it just becomes a matter of who has the most charismatic foghorns and the most appealing representation. Which has a very reasonable logic of it’s own, as far as it goes.
Logic is reasoning based on proveable facts so no it’s not going to tell you what something is, just how probable something is.
That wouldn’t be the logical conclusion because we are limited as humans. We make mistakes, we don’t understand everything, we misremember, we can even gaslight ourselves such as the mandela effect. If 50 people told me they experienced an alien abduction, that doesn’t make it logically true, now if they were to show me proveable facts of the abduction then I would be more inclined to believe.
I’m not sure what you mean with the last paragraph, you are clearly describing illogical subjective experiences but calling them “very reasonable logic of it’s own”. What you are describing isn’t logic, what you’re describing is the opposite of logic. Someone claiming something they believe is true but can’t provide validity.
You said that you don’t know for sure if it’s matter or consciousness that comes first but everything you’re saying hinges on you very firmly believing that matter is prior.
If you had genuine uncertainty about it, you would be much more careful about how you go about asking for proof. If you weren’t sure that matter is prior, it would occur to you to question what “objective” and “subjective” means. I could also ask you, can you step outside consciousness and objectively prove to me that your matter exists? If not, why do you value objective over subjective so much?
So to round back to your initial question: you can intellectually acknowledge the difficulty of proving matter vs. consciousness, yet if we probe it, clearly you hold a firm belief about it despite not being able to rationally prove your belief. So you can ask your initial question from yourself now. Despite your reasoning skill, why aren’t you more skeptical about the materialist view AND it’s implications?
Your intelligence is your ability to learn, It would be hard to argue that someone is very good at learning if they are confident in things they can’t prove. If Neil degrasse told me he knew exactly what happened after death then I would reconsider anything I’ve learned from him.
I’m not so sure about that. Anyway I can only speak for myself. I’m not ”100% confident” in my personal beliefs. I believe what I put out in thought, word and deed eventually comes back around, although perhaps not in the exact way or form, from the same venues, that I put it out there. Can I prove it? No and that’s why it’s “faith” and "belief.” I’m not trying to convince anyone, but am open to discussion, when I’ve time and inclination, and feel it’s in good faith.
Imo, things can affect logic, like mood, nutrition, health, how much people have happening at once. So yes, I like to think I’m fairly logical, certainly a lot less emotional as I age. But I’m not wedded to it, because I have faith I’ll wake up tomorrow, but know there’s a possibility I won’t. That seems logical.
You might be thinking of a personal definition of logic. Mood, nutrition, and health can affect a person’s ability to use logic, it does not affect logic itself. Having faith that you’ll wake up tomorrow and understanding there is a possibility you won’t is not an example of logic, that is an example of understanding mortality.
No but the latter is what science-minded people do. They insist that matter comes before consciousness without being able to prove it, though what’s extremely obvious in everyone’s direct experience is that consciousness is needed before anything else is said about the world. It’s a false status quo.
There is a prevelant theory but it’s still an unanswered philosophical question that noone truly intelligent would tell you they knew definitively. Anyone asserting that matter 100% comes before conciousness is on the same wavelength as someone telling you there is 100% a god controlling everything.
So we can at least agree that people who are confident in something unproveable are objectively unintelligent.
You’re wiggling a bit but let’s go with that and get to your original question.
Based on your responses, you probably hold a core belief that matter comes before consciousness. You’re smart enough to admit it’s not a certainty but you’ve probably lived your whole life fairly assured it’s the case. You speak English well so you have at least been exposed to western culture - which is very materialistic (religious or no, Christianity is also functionally materialistic), and so the core belief both serves you well, and is positively reinforced.
Any new information you get is subconsciously aligned to this core belief. Any decision you make is informed by it. You have a network of data in your head and it all connects to this and some other core beliefs. The same way a religious person can be highly logical but they hold a different core belief and so subtly, everything they know aligns to that belief. The more irrational the core belief, the more convoluted the links are of course but it makes sense to them - they just may not be able to represent it to you with the symbols that is language. And sometimes you’ll just get them doing the loading screen face when they try to rationalize their views - then it just becomes a question of which core VALUE is deeper for them; rationality or their religious view.
If rationality is more valuable, it necessarily demolishes the religious view. It demolishes a core belief to which they have aligned all their knowledge about the world. Which is a hell of a trip, and can be very scary. Which is also why rationality often loses.
Born and raised in north america, went to a baptist church as a kid so I’m fairly familiar with the bible as well as different types of religious people you’ll meet.
As an agnostic now, my only core belief is I know that I don’t know. That’s something I apply to any philosophical question so it’s alien to me that some people can separate logic and religion.
For me, I get that logic too is just models that predict things. Backwards or forwards. But it doesn’t answer what anything is. You can only EXPERIENCE what something is, but you can never accurately represent it. Because the moment you try to represent an experience, it’s not the experience itself, just a representation. So logical conclusion is that the only way to know something for sure, is to experience it as it is before any representation.
People with religious experiences may get to the ineffable truth but then they get enamored by their own attempts to represent it. They focus on the representation, instead of the experience, and they start to insist that their representation is the bestest and most correctest - because everything in their head aligns to it. Then it just becomes a matter of who has the most charismatic foghorns and the most appealing representation. Which has a very reasonable logic of it’s own, as far as it goes.
Logic is reasoning based on proveable facts so no it’s not going to tell you what something is, just how probable something is.
That wouldn’t be the logical conclusion because we are limited as humans. We make mistakes, we don’t understand everything, we misremember, we can even gaslight ourselves such as the mandela effect. If 50 people told me they experienced an alien abduction, that doesn’t make it logically true, now if they were to show me proveable facts of the abduction then I would be more inclined to believe.
I’m not sure what you mean with the last paragraph, you are clearly describing illogical subjective experiences but calling them “very reasonable logic of it’s own”. What you are describing isn’t logic, what you’re describing is the opposite of logic. Someone claiming something they believe is true but can’t provide validity.
You said that you don’t know for sure if it’s matter or consciousness that comes first but everything you’re saying hinges on you very firmly believing that matter is prior.
If you had genuine uncertainty about it, you would be much more careful about how you go about asking for proof. If you weren’t sure that matter is prior, it would occur to you to question what “objective” and “subjective” means. I could also ask you, can you step outside consciousness and objectively prove to me that your matter exists? If not, why do you value objective over subjective so much?
So to round back to your initial question: you can intellectually acknowledge the difficulty of proving matter vs. consciousness, yet if we probe it, clearly you hold a firm belief about it despite not being able to rationally prove your belief. So you can ask your initial question from yourself now. Despite your reasoning skill, why aren’t you more skeptical about the materialist view AND it’s implications?
Unintelligent? Maybe. Maybe the rest have had the power of imagination constrained so long, it’s atrophied. But exercise may restore a degree of it.
Your intelligence is your ability to learn, It would be hard to argue that someone is very good at learning if they are confident in things they can’t prove. If Neil degrasse told me he knew exactly what happened after death then I would reconsider anything I’ve learned from him.
I’m not so sure about that. Anyway I can only speak for myself. I’m not ”100% confident” in my personal beliefs. I
believewhat I put out in thought, word and deed eventually comes back around, although perhaps not in the exact way or form, from the same venues, that I put it out there. Can I prove it? No and that’s why it’s “faith” and "belief.” I’m not trying to convince anyone, but am open to discussion, when I’ve time and inclination, and feel it’s in good faith.Are you otherwise a very logical person in other aspects of life? Because it sounds like you may not be the type of person I’m talking about.
Imo, things can affect logic, like mood, nutrition, health, how much people have happening at once. So yes, I like to think I’m fairly logical, certainly a lot less emotional as I age. But I’m not wedded to it, because I have faith I’ll wake up tomorrow, but know there’s a possibility I won’t. That seems logical.
You might be thinking of a personal definition of logic. Mood, nutrition, and health can affect a person’s ability to use logic, it does not affect logic itself. Having faith that you’ll wake up tomorrow and understanding there is a possibility you won’t is not an example of logic, that is an example of understanding mortality.
Okay