Certain people can't ever get it right

[Chap]

MG is really getting worked up, isn't he?

[Lem]

MG is really getting worked up, isn't he?

Truly.

In essence, my posting has been pointing out the fact that you and other secularists are claiming to have viewfinders that have the correct settings which will give you a leg up in your determination of what is true and what is false. I look at your determinations as being the result of an incomplete view of reality. For you to determine the confines and restraints of what can be considered real is rather arrogant and prideful.

Odd, because only mg has invoked the 'viewfinder' metaphor, and only mg has claimed his 'viewfinder' approach is correct. To then turn around and argue others are doing what only he has done is a bizarre bit of projection. All one can conclude is that mg secretly despises himself, but, unable to face up to that, he comes here to despise others. How else to interpret his absolute me vs. ALL of you stance?

[mentalgymnast]

MG is really getting worked up, isn't he?

Replying to a post that, as you can see, was cobbled together to throw up a smokescreen to distort the use of metaphor in order to provide possible glimpses of how the gospel/church and its doctrines can be understood through looking at a larger picture.

Earlier in the thread when I brought up the Sorites Paradox I was doing the same thing. There are folks, may I say some here, that look at isolated parts of a greater whole and make judgement calls without providing full context and/or looking at all the moving parts. Their viewfinder settings provide a restricted vision of the whole.

They can’t see the forest for the trees.

And as I’ve mentioned, that is to be expected when we realize that as human beings we are prone to looking at the world through a binary lens. We have to consciously train ourselves to see the world in all of its kaleidoscopic wonder. OTOH, tunnel vision only offers a limited perspective which then results in a distorted view of reality. That is, if reality consists of something more than what you see right in front of your binocular eyes.

Regards,
MG

[mentalgymnast]

MG is really getting worked up, isn't he?

Truly.

And that’s why I’ve been referring to you as Lemming. A follower, even if it leads in a direction that can later be found to be mistaken.

Answering a post is , “worked up”?

May I say there are indications that you have become a bit worked up?

Regards,
MG

[Chap]

MG is really getting worked up, isn't he?

Truly.

In essence, my posting has been pointing out the fact that you and other secularists are claiming to have viewfinders that have the correct settings which will give you a leg up in your determination of what is true and what is false. I look at your determinations as being the result of an incomplete view of reality. For you to determine the confines and restraints of what can be considered real is rather arrogant and prideful.

Odd, because only mg has invoked the 'viewfinder' metaphor, and only mg has claimed his 'viewfinder' approach is correct. To then turn around and argue others are doing what only he has done is a bizarre bit of projection. All one can conclude is that mg secretly despises himself, but, unable to face up to that, he comes here to despise others. How else to interpret his absolute me vs. ALL of you stance?

Yup, I agree it's odd. He brought up the whole 'viewfinder' thing for the first time in this post, I think:

The earth is round and flat at the same time.This is obvious. That it is round appears indisputable; that it is flat is our common experience, also indisputable. The globe does not supersede the map; the map does not distort the globe.
-Jeanette Winterson

It’s where we set our viewfinder that’s the key. I am the earth. I am round and flat at the same time.

It’s interesting to consider the fact that if any one or more of you had testimonies of the restoration of the gospel of Jesus Christ and that Jesus is the Christ and that God lives, your viewfinder would capture me differently. And what a difference that would make.

As it is, your viewfinder is set differently.

Regards,
MG

So far as this makes any discernible sense, this seems to be a response to what people were saying about MG in preceding posts, such as:

I'm not buying mg's 'aw shucks' routine. He has the same intent he has always had, to disrupt the conversations of those who don't follow the Mormon path. Even before the great troll jubilee, instituted by our illustrious leader Shades on our previous board, I had in interest in the academic research on trolling, and one of the best articles on internet trolling I have ever read could have been a case study on mg. Here are some excerpts that are exceptionally relevant to this thread:

Trolls do not initiate discourse but respond to it for the simple reason that they do not care about any particular semantic focus. They are not interested in what they write about; they are interested in the cognitive, emotional, and pragmatic reactions that they can obtain….

Trolling parasitically constructs its position, so that it results not only in contrary, but also mirror-like contradictory to the opinion that is voiced by the interlocutor.

One of the socially disquieting aspects of trolling is, indeed, that the troll does not have a mind, but builds it in relation to that of [those he trolls]; the troll, moreover, does not pursue the objective of expressing a radically different opinion and convincing the interlocutor and/or the audience of it, but rather seeks to provoke.

His discursive practice therefore consists in measuring out the outrageousness of arguments, so that initial contradictory semantic positions do not immediately disclose the real nature of the game [but] spiral, in which progressively more and more intolerable arguments are used without giving out, for that reason, the fictitiousness of their pragmatics.

Trolling, however, is not only characterized by a specific pragmatics and a particular semantics; its syntactic logic too contributes to the overall semiotic effect of this discursive genre.

... the counterpart of choosing and endorsing opposite arguments is necessary but not sufficient.... In order to achieve its sadistic goal, trolling must be full of non sequitur, repetitions, petitions of principle, arguments ad personam, and so on, skillfully displaying an array of logical fallacies that constitute a sort of counter manual of rhetoric....

That describes our troll perfectly.

To my shame, I think that I do buy it--every. frickin. time. And as each time plays out, to its inevitable and inexorable conclusion, I always arrive at the place where I'd like to kick my own dumb ass down the road and back.

That's because you are a kind and thoughtful person! No shame in that. I'm just coming from a place where grindael, may he rest in peace, multiple times, both publicly and privately, shared his anguish at the way mg treated him, causing me to research the situation after that, learning much about trolls and the damage they do, how they do it, and why. There is absolutely no question in my mind that mg posts in order to disrupt and antagonize. The things he has said over the years to grindael are unforgivable. The real problem is, he walks away in anonymity, after hurting real people. It is unconscionable, but it seems to be a pattern that he can't let go.

I suspect that mentalgymnast is not really trying to make any sophisticated epistemological point here (i.e. a point about the nature and validity of knowledge). It's more like him saying:

"You guys all seem to think I am a pain in the ass that contributes nothing worthwhile to the discussion, and simply wastes other posters' time and energy with faux bonhomie and trolling while occasionally telling them they are intellectually unsophisticated in various ways. But if you were LDS you'd think I was really cool."

Seen that way, it's more of a cry of pain than anything else.

[Bret Ripley]

Holden Caulfield: Phony people like to talk about things like the earth or the moon but they don't know anything. They really don't. I looked through a telescope once and there wasn't any dark side. You only have to look for yourself.

Greek Chorus: "The finger that points at the moon is not the moon."

HC: Pull my finger.

[Bret Ripley]

Dup, and not worth reading twice.

[Doctor CamNC4Me]

Just placed the book on hold!

- Doc

For anyone interested, you should get the book. Exhalation is excellent, and the first story is sublime. I ain’t gonna ruin it with spoilers, so just get it. It’s a fast read.

- Doc

[Lem]

Just placed the book on hold!

- Doc

For anyone interested, you should get the book. Exhalation is excellent, and the first story is sublime. I ain’t gonna ruin it with spoilers, so just get it. It’s a fast read.

- Doc

So glad you liked it. He is an amazing writer!!

[Physics Guy]

What is this book? I've had a tough week and I tried skimmiing over the last several pages of this thread but didn't notice the book mentioned, so I guess I missed something. I know that if I just read it all carefully I'll find it, but I'm tired. Could someone just fill me in?

Otherwise, I think I can see some relationship between the heap paradox and religious belief, even if the concept of infinity seems irrelevant to both. There's a certain nonlinearity, I think, in the relationship between argument and evidence, on the one hand, and belief on the other. I made a couple of graphs to illustrate this once, but they were simple enough that I could probably just describe them in words.

The first graph shows degree of belief on the vertical axis, and evidence on the horizontal axis. The curve is what's called a sigmoid, shaped sort of like the letter S, only stretched. It starts out low: where the evidence is slight belief is also low. Moving right, the curve rises: as evidence accumulates, belief increases. At some point belief rises more steeply: the evidence reaches a critical mass and belief rises to something only slightly below 100%. If further evidence accumulates, belief strengthens further, but it takes an awful lot of evidence to make belief certain. The main action is clearly in the middle part of the graph where belief rises steeply when evidence surpasses a threshold.

That's the first graph, and it's what I call the Apologist's Model for belief. Apologists reckon that they can get you into that critical region and push you over the threshold. That seems to be the model that is assumed by apologists for any religion or for atheism. It's the premise that makes their work worthwhile.

My second graph has the same axes, but the curve is now truly an S shape: instead of just rising steeply in the middle, it bends back, then bends forward again. In mathematical terms, it's a "fold catastrophe". What it's supposed to imply in practice is that once you reach a certain threshold of evidence, your belief doesn't just start to rise a lot more steeply. It actually jumps, Boom, to a much higher level.

That's because the idea is that the middle part of the "S", where it bends backward, isn't really a state of belief that anyone can seriously hold. It represents a bizarre mindset in which more evidence makes you believe less, and less evidence makes you believe more. Nobody thinks that way. But what the curve is supposed to represent—and catastrophe theory is a thing because things like this do happen—is that at some point there has to be a jump. Once the evidence accumulates past a certain point, it's just no longer possible to keep increasing your belief a bit more. You have to jump it way up. Or conversely, once the evidence falls below a certain point, you can't just decrease your belief a bit more—you have to drop it way down.

My idea is that the reason it works this way is that rationalisation operates after the evidence, and can argue away a certain amount of evidence one way or the other. But rationalisation has limits. Once you push past them, the house of cards falls.

The thing is then that the new state of belief—whether high or low—won't switch back right away even if the evidence slides a bit backwards. You skip the backwards-bending part of the "S", but the top of the S hangs over the bottom part pf the S a fair way. So once you've fallen from the top to the bottom—or jumped from bottom to top—it will take a good deal more evidence, one way or the other, to make you jump or fall back. Think where you are on the "S".

I think that the back-bending true "S" rather than the steeply rising sigmoid is a better representation of how humans think. It's also based on my having to teach about the van der Waals gas and the Maxwell Construction in statistical mechanics, which is to say that it's a typical theoretical physicists's way of seeing the whole world look like our nail. So take it with a grain of salt, just on principle. Still I think there's a grain of truth in there, too.

Yeah, people's world views constrain them. But world views are things that we choose, and we choose them for reasons. If you're going to argue about faith and belief, I think you have to recognise this issue and try to get beyond it. People should be able to recognise that a position is coherent and consistent even if they don't find it convincing. If you want to get them to recognise your position that way, you have to show that it is coherent and consistent, without asking anyone to be convinced first.