How real are you?

Royal Institute of Philosophy ^ | Mary Midgley

[texan75010]

I used to think about stuff like this when I was 12 yrs old. Then life comes along and smacks you upside the head to let you know what’s real and what’s not.

[Sola Veritas]

“Richard Dawkins is an educated idiot.”

Actually and sadly, Richard Dawkins is best described as a fool. An idiot knows nothing, but a fool does not wisely use what knowledge he has.

[Tainan]

I’ve been invisible.

Or so I thought...just one of the stages.

[MamaTexan]

I originally waded through this piece of egotistical tripe in an effort to learn something, but the argument fell apart right here:

But if the only thing that made people accept such laws was really the rational prudence that he appeals to, societies would certainly never have been invented.

The author's refusal to accept that people can exercise their free will and transcend their basic state of nature makes the rest of the article just so much used cat litter.

[Oztrich Boy]

[Louis Foxwell]

These phantom folk deal incessantly in 2nd (and 3rd) realities. They are not willing to accept absolute reality, so they grant reality to their fantasies.

[Mrs. Don-o]

save fir later reading

[devane617]

take a lit cigarette and stick it in your eye. there's your answer.

[The Spirit Of Allegiance]

It is a tribute to how far we have come in theoretical physics that it now takes enormous machines and a great deal of money to perform an experiment whose results we cannot predict.
— Stephen Hawking in a 1980 lecture, quoted in Chaos.

[OpusatFR]

Dawson sounds autistic. The ones I’ve seen over the years all believe they are the only “real” being in the world and all others are “not.”

[Calm_Cool_and_Elected]

This should be interesting PING!

[Ethan Clive Osgoode]

This should be interesting

It could be. But the ones who actually believe (such as certain evolutionists) that we are not real, and that the people around us are merely anthropomorphic illusions in service of molecules and genes, that beauty and purpose in nature are not real, that truth is an illusion... will hardly say so in this thread, for fear of the much-deserved ridicule that they would certainly receive. They will make those points in other threads, prefixed with the customary "science says that..."

[glide625]

You realize of course that in the second paragraph you have summed up the world view of Blonde and the third paragraph you’ve summed up the world view of un-Blonde.

[2harddrive]

The English Bishop Berkely believed that the universe disappeared when he closed his eyes, but came back again when he opened them. True solipsism. Didn’t they name a way-out city and University in California after him?

[txnuke]

Sad fact: As a teenager, one of my favorite sayings was “Reality is for people who can’t handle drugs.” This is — of course — the converse of a saying with some truth: “Drugs are for people who can’t handle reality.”

[Ethan Clive Osgoode]

It is a tribute to how far we have come in theoretical physics that it now takes enormous machines and a great deal of money to perform an experiment whose results we cannot predict. — Stephen Hawking in a 1980 lecture, quoted in Chaos.

Very odd. For here on FR, I am assured by a variety of science-talkers, that science is powerless to determine if there is a cabbage in my fridge or not. Since "science does not deal in truths", they say, but in "useful models", the best science can do is provide evidence supporting a useful model concerning the cabbage that may or may not be in my fridge, according to the prevailing scientific paradigm of course.

[CodeToad]

Sounds like another hippie found a lost tab of acid in the seat cushions.

[Ethan Clive Osgoode]

The English Bishop Berkely believed that the universe disappeared when he closed his eyes, but came back again when he opened them

One need not look far to find people with strange ideas. There is a poster right here on FR (an atheist-evolutionist) who happens to believe that we are all made of waves of nothing.

[tom paine 2]

If we are no more than a collection of atoms connected by a nervous system, then Mr. Dawkins writings are no more valid than a billion monkeys typing on typewriters.

[RobinOfKingston]

The individual organism... is not fundamental to life, but something that emerges when genes, which at the beginning of evolution were separate, warring entities, gang together in co-operative groups as `selfish co-operators’. The individual organism is not exactly an illusion. It is too concrete for that. But it is a secondary, derived phenomenon, cobbled together as a consequence of the actions of fundamentally separate, even warring, agents.... Perhaps the subjective ‘I’, the person that I feel myself to be, is the same kind of semi-illusion. The mind is a collection of fundamentally independent, even warring, agents.... Whether or not these agents are to be identified with memes... the subjective feeling of ‘somebody in there’ may be a cobbled, emergent, semi-illusion analogous to the individual body emerging in evolution from the uneasy co-operation of genes.

Our little friend Dickey Dawkins should have this piece set to liturgical music, for use in his Cathedral of the Divine Possibility.

To return my comments on the more mundane, Mr Dawkins remains proof, at least to me, that there really is a Dick for every Dolly.