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> It's important to respect their religious liberty even if you disagree. I respect other people's right to have strongly-held beliefs about roughly anything,

> It's important to respect their religious liberty even if you disagree. I respect other people's right to have strongly-held beliefs about roughly anything, even if they're wrong. I'd rather they were wrong, than that they "believed" something that is beyond belief and disbelief. In the case of "beliefs" that are unverifiable in principle, well I don't count those as beliefs; and equally, I don't think it's possible to disagree with such "beliefs". I'm with Wittgenstein on that; these are things that you can state (or deny) completely grammatically, but whose assertion (or denial) is meaningless. I also like the idea that if a thing can't, in principle, make a detectable difference to the world, then it doesn't make sense to speak of it as real or unreal.

TeMPOraL 3y ago
Exactly this. If a belief can't generate a testable prediction, even one not necessarily testable by us right now, but testable in principle, then that belief is meaningless. There's no basis to claim its true or false, it has no impact on reality whatsoever. It's a waste of effort to even think about it.
- mizzao 3y ago
  This is the textbook definition of the religion of Scientism: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientism
  - TeMPOraL 3y ago
    Sure, whatever. Call it religion if you like, but try and define something existing or being true in a way that doesn't involve making testable predictions.
  - denton-scratch 3y ago
    Thanks for the wikipedia link. It says that Dennett and the "New Atheists" assert "that God does not exist". That perfectly exemplifies my point: you can't use non-verifiability to prove that God doesn't exist. What it proves is that neither an unverifiable claim nor it's contradiction is meaningful. From the wiki article, it looks to me like my position isn't Scientism at all. The article presents Scientism as a kind of fallacy: attempting to apply some version of scientific method to everything. What I'm on about is more like ternary logic: a thing can be True, or it can be False, or it can be neither. It's closer to Not Even Wrong. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Not_even_wrong https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Not_even_wrong
- switchbak 3y ago
  This is why discussions of free will and living in a simulation seem pointless to me. I’ve never heard of a way to test them. Provide me a test and I’ll happily reconsider!
  - TeMPOraL 3y ago
    The simulation hypothesis is in principle testable in that, if we were in a simulation, we may be able to find bugs in it, possibly even escape the sandbox. Right now, we don't have any "angle of attack", and nothing we could suspect of being a bug (which includes e.g. being able to perceive artifacts of some optimization in the simulation) - so there's no point in working oneself up about this, or assuming it's true. However, because this is testable in theory and there's a possibility it'll become testable in practice, it doesn't qualify as fundamentally "meaningless" in my book.

TeMPOraL 3y ago

Exactly this. If a belief can't generate a testable prediction, even one not necessarily testable by us right now, but testable in principle, then that belief is meaningless. There's no basis to claim its true or false, it has no impact on reality whatsoever. It's a waste of effort to even think about it.

mizzao 3y ago
This is the textbook definition of the religion of Scientism: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientism
- TeMPOraL 3y ago
  Sure, whatever. Call it religion if you like, but try and define something existing or being true in a way that doesn't involve making testable predictions.
- denton-scratch 3y ago
  Thanks for the wikipedia link. It says that Dennett and the "New Atheists" assert "that God does not exist". That perfectly exemplifies my point: you can't use non-verifiability to prove that God doesn't exist. What it proves is that neither an unverifiable claim nor it's contradiction is meaningful. From the wiki article, it looks to me like my position isn't Scientism at all. The article presents Scientism as a kind of fallacy: attempting to apply some version of scientific method to everything. What I'm on about is more like ternary logic: a thing can be True, or it can be False, or it can be neither. It's closer to Not Even Wrong. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Not_even_wrong https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Not_even_wrong
switchbak 3y ago
This is why discussions of free will and living in a simulation seem pointless to me. I’ve never heard of a way to test them. Provide me a test and I’ll happily reconsider!
- TeMPOraL 3y ago
  The simulation hypothesis is in principle testable in that, if we were in a simulation, we may be able to find bugs in it, possibly even escape the sandbox. Right now, we don't have any "angle of attack", and nothing we could suspect of being a bug (which includes e.g. being able to perceive artifacts of some optimization in the simulation) - so there's no point in working oneself up about this, or assuming it's true. However, because this is testable in theory and there's a possibility it'll become testable in practice, it doesn't qualify as fundamentally "meaningless" in my book.