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You insist on the importance of absolutes and axioms, but is uncertainty really so fatal to meaning in life? Is it not, on the contrary, the very lifeblood of the journey of discovery that we so often celebrate as superior to the destination?
When it comes to moral calculus, utilitarianism strikes me as a red herring; for the individual,…
You insist on the importance of absolutes and axioms, but is uncertainty really so fatal to meaning in life? Is it not, on the contrary, the very lifeblood of the journey of discovery that we so often celebrate as superior to the destination?
When it comes to moral calculus, utilitarianism strikes me as a red herring; for the individual, interpersonal encounters that constitute the narrative arc of a human life Bayesian updating seems perfectly compatible with an empirical, materialist worldview. We begin with some innate, but not immutable, intuitions about the nature of human well-being. Experience, then, strengthens or weakens our convictions as well as informs us about our limitations as conscious--but finite--beings.
If "dealing with reality" is a process and not a state, I don't see why "myth, ritual and folklore" and "data, empiricism and skeptical inquiry" should be regarded as incompatible, let alone mutually exclusive. Both channels can be useful for processing and communicating subjective experience. Both are valid as interpretive frameworks that help us explore the frontiers of our epistemic abilities. Problems arise for religion when it presents itself as a historical account of matters that reside deep in the heartland of human rational competence. Problems arise for science when it tries to tell a story.