sismetic t1_it2kswy wrote on October 20, 2022 at 2:06 PM

Reply to comment by dmarchall491 in [Peter Harrison] Why religion is not going away and science will not destroy it by BasketCase0024

> It's all just a experiments, predictions and replication, and you are free to join.

Sure, but what has that got to do with truth? What is meant by truth? That you have a coherent model of practical tinkering(like I said before) has little to do with truth, especially existential truths. If we are in an illusion, for example, the models and the experiments would still be useful and practical, but they would not be truth.

> If they wanted to have a deeper understanding of reality, they'd do science. But the stories science tell might not be the ones they want to hear and they can get a little complicated, as they are based in reality, not fantasy.

No. What is reality? Is reality accessible to sense-experience? How do you know? We have scientific evidence to the contrary. Naive realism is dead and it's not coming back. Science is useful for practical reasons, but the claim of truth or existential truths is just ignorant(I don't mean this in a rude way). It doesn't ask the questions nor posits to have answers, all the questions it makes are of an immediate sort to the sense-experience to gain control of the environment and from that we make models of prediction. Truth is not in-built into science, only observation, community trust, experimentation and on a later stage theoretical models around prediction.

Again, what is the relevance of that to truth, and how do you understand truth?

GoSeeCal_Spot t1_it2tnul wrote on October 20, 2022 at 3:05 PM

They aren't truth in made up circumstance, well done.

sismetic t1_it4qjhq wrote on October 20, 2022 at 10:37 PM

I'm not sure what you even mean.

dmarchall491 t1_it2nzk7 wrote on October 20, 2022 at 2:28 PM

> Again, what is the relevance of that to truth, and how do you understand truth?

I consider truth seeking a colossal waste of time. Since not only is there good reason to assume we'll never find it, but also very good reason to assume it is fundamentally impossible to find. If we all live in a simulation, how can you ever hope to find that out? All we can do is describe the rules of that simulation, since that's what we can observe and interact with. What's outside that simulation is completely out of our reach.

And beside, it's not like any other form of knowledge seeking will ever bring you truth either. Most of them can't even describe the rules of this simulation.

sismetic t1_it4r74f wrote on October 20, 2022 at 10:42 PM

> And beside, it's not like any other form of knowledge seeking will ever bring you truth either. Most of them can't even describe the rules of this simulation.

That is because the religious truth doesn't need to deal with the rules of the simulation. It can go meta of it. For example, the nature of how I should think and live are the same regardless of the scenario and the simulation. Virtue, for example, is universal and would be universal in all planes of existence, be them simulated planes or non-simulated planes. The rules of the simulation grant control of the environment, but have nothing to do with the intrinsic being-ness of our psychological nature, or at least not directly. No simulation provides in itself existential orientation, which is what religions aim to provide.

As for whether truth-seeking is absurd or not, without truth that becomes irrational statement. You are claiming that to be true("it is true that truth-seeking is a waste of time"). But there are different kinds of truth and scopes of truth. I do not require an absolute truth because I am not an absolute entity.