Dan Dennett on creating meaning in life

Explore the meaning and joy of life with 100 atheists in this book of photos and commentary featuring Richard Dawkins, Dan Dennett, Steven Pinker, Penn & Teller, Julia Sweeney, Alex Honnold, Derren Brown, and more!

A Better Life: 100 Atheists Speak Out on Joy and Meaning in a World Without God will be released on January 1st, 2014.

[buffalowycowboy]

You just proved that my comment was true, you do not know anything about philosophy. Aristotle invented categorical syllogism's and logic is a discipline in philosophy and math. Logic is deductive and and inductive. A valid and sound deductive argument provides a true conclusion. Obviously you have not taken a formal course in logic.

[GetMeThere]

er...I don't really see it as Dennett does. I do think, however, that the fact that we CAN add to "what others have done before" is rather meaningful in itself.

For me meaning is fathoming what I'm actually a part of (in a very broad sense). It doesn't come from just "doing something, " as he suggests.

[AguzSuiCaedere]

Daniel Dennett looks like Santa Claus.

[matthewtenney]

The best good life for the atheist is to avoid suicide.

[bobh]

" How so That's obviously nonsense"

Categorical Syllogism Symbolic predicate logic

1. All humans are mortals. (∀x)(Hx ⊃ Mx)

2. Socrates is a human. Hs (Universal Instantiation)

3. Therefore, Socrates is mortal ∴Ms (1, 2 M.P.) [Modus Ponens]

Mood and figure: valid and sound.

Obviously, you don’t have a clue about logic or any thing else.

[buffalowycowboy]

The universe is 13.7E9 years old. The earth is 4.5 billion years old. Modern man as been around for less that 100, 000 years. How can you claim fine tuning when the purpose of gods creation has been absent from the creation for 99.9999 percent of the time?
If a Goldilocks zone is the only requirement for gods creatures to exist, why are there 10 million galaxies in the universe?

[lfzadra]

You are walking on the street and see two guys named Fred colliding and disappearing into oblivion. Your options:

1) Fall on your knees and pray for Jesus. The end is near.
2) Cheat and rename them to positive Fred and negative Fred, so you can go home and keep your delusion that math and logic are a fundamental truths about the universe, and not merely symbolic languages we created to describe and measure the world.

[insidetrip]

You mean a class in positivist epistemology, that even Bertrand Russel decided was the greatest failure of all Western Philosophy?

Because, that's what you are describing (except how you're saying its justified independent of experience, which if you're pointing to the universe for validation I have no clue how you're claiming that's true).

Gödel's incompleteness theorem says that we can't have absolute certitude in our mathematics (through math proof), and if we do then it is intuition.

[lfzadra]

Symbols do not contain meaning. Truth is produced with meaning, not with symbolic pointers to meaning alone. Even a symbol must be something you visualize somehow.
The attributes of a light saber are self-consistent and logically valid. Where's my light saber?
Math is an axiomatic system, a language. 1+1=2 is true because I say so. Please give me the sum of one particle plus one antiparticle. If you can't know this a priori, how do you know a priori the result of one particle + one particle?

[buffalowycowboy]

You should take a class in formal logic, and learn symbolic language. The argument is valid: Mood and figure : AOO- 2
This argument is easily shown to be deductively valid in classical first order logic.

All God’s attributes are self-consistent
Some predicates (omniscience, omnipotent, etc) are not self-consistent
Therefore, At least one predicate (omniscience) is not an attribute.
Basically, the argument states from deduction that God is a logical impossibility.

Is 2+2=4, a posteriori?

[lfzadra]

Without seeing something that you can use to fill a variable, how exactly can you produce the idea of an variable? Can you invent the dock for an iPhone before the iPhone?
I'm pretty aware of a priori logic. And pretty aware that, without proper empiric support, it produces meaningless garbage only, a knowledge that, of course, can only occurs a posteriori, never a priori.
(∃x)(Px ⋅ ~Ax) - You said nothing with this equation. A void logic statement has no result, therefore can't produce truth.

[buffalowycowboy]

It is called critical thinking. Again you have proved that you do not understand the difference between knowledge that is a priori and knowledge that is a posteriori.
Categorical Syllogism
1. All God’s attributes are self-consistent. (∀x)(Ax ⊃ Cx)
2. Some predicates are not self-consistent (∃x)(Px ⋅ ~ Cx)
∴ 3. Some predicates are not God’s attributes (∃x)(Px ⋅ ~Ax)

[jgmrichter]

What other methods of arriving at truth do you allow?
If science can fail, its failure to verify God's existence does not mean faith is unwarranted. Believers also get things wrong - the history of faith is full of corrections. (Sceptics sometimes prefer to call these 'inconsistencies'). But through failure people learn and have an opportunity to become more reasonable, more human, and live more meaningful lives.
Refining is not always the same as redefining.

[lfzadra]

Of coursed there's no trick in pointing out metaphysical foundations. The trick lies in the action of redefining ad nauseam over the centuries what are you talking about.
Never said science is always successful. In fact, great part of the success of science is the capacity to say when science fails. You have no such capacity, you can't fail.
Never claimed science is the only method to truth. This is not equal to admit that you have a method to truth.

[jgmrichter]

There's no trick in pointing out the metaphysical foundations. I purposely referred to articles by atheists so there would be no need for suspicion, and they point to something much more fluid.
To say "science is always successful" is like saying "you always find something in the last place you look" - it's a truism. And a claim that science is the only way to discover truth would not itself be scientific, logical, or empirical.
You're welcome to PM me if you want to take this further.

[lfzadra]

Of course you need to deconstruct me. That is precisely the trick I will not accept. Why science have no need to go back over and over again to redefine completely its metaphysical foundations? Because such foundations are solid. Whatever science is looking for, it is finding.
The fact you need to keep redefining your foundations, terms and concepts over and over again is already evidence that, whatever you are looking for, it is not there, and if it is there, it is not what you think it is.

[jgmrichter]

I posted the articles because we need a common vocabulary. You keep insisting that I justify my belief with an "epistemological methodology", a phrase loaded with unspoken premises that first have to be deconstructed. Otherwise you just end up with straw men.
Knowledge is abstract. You don't have a physical chair in your head when you recall a real one. And I would have to describe my faith in the same way as introducing you to someone you have never met - incompletely and unsatisfactorily.

[lfzadra]

Epistemology is the field of study where we talk about the subject and how to get the truth about the subject. As far as I can tell, you can barely define what you want know, not how to know it.
You can point known limitations in anything. From this fact does not follow that you are in possession of an abstract tool that can overcome the limitations you are pointing. So, how to know god is real? I feel he is real, therefore he is real? That's the way it's done?

[jgmrichter]

Then you don't know what you're asking. Our difference lies in fundamental epistemic principles, not in methodologies Foundationalism (such as your own apparent rationalism) has known limitations, so any adequate discussion requires what Calvin Shrag calls 'transversal' reasoning.
Surely you don't expect to find a satisfactory explanation in the comments section of youtube.

[jgmrichter]

Again, only if you cling to the Enlightenment's concept of reason. If it is good science it is provisional, and this "standard" is now being revised by strict empiricists like Popper himself. It is ludicrous to call almost everyone before the 1800s irrational, and if you insist on doing so, you weaken any case against irrationality.

There is nothing miraculous about people having scientific beliefs, either. I'm not talking about miraculous results, just meaningful ones.