[MD] Dog Dishes and Direct Experience

[118]

Hi Matt,
Fair enough, I was trying to make a point by resorting to hyperbole.  I was asking a lot from the audience with my example "from the edges".  I do stick to my statement concerning faith, but it was indeed a big leap, and probably did not add much to the discussion at hand, without any elaboration.  As you say, it is easy to muddy the waters, by generalizing terminology as I did.

Thank you for your link, I will give it a read and provide my opinion (for what it's worth).  Not having read it yet, I may be premature in asking: Where does Faith end?  I am fine with categorizing it, but we do seem to draw a distinct line between a religious faith and a scientific belief.  I do not find such a line easy to draw.

Perhaps once I have read your article, I will better understand your criteria.

Until then,
Mark

Sent laboriously from an iPhone,
Mark

On Dec 31, 2011, at 1:44 PM, Matt Kundert <pirsigaffliction at hotmail.com> wrote:

> 
> Hi Mark,
> 
> Mark said:
> I enjoyed your [Dan's] perpetual machine story, I thought it was 
> apropos.  However, I read into it perhaps more than was intended.  In 
> my opinion, you were referring to Faith.  It seems to me that we 
> survive on faith.  For example, I do not need proof through the night 
> that the sun will rise in the morning.  In fact, it is not something that 
> I think about.  This is synonymous with faith, in my opinion.  It would 
> be no different from the certainty in a perpetual motion machine in a 
> mountain.
> 
> Matt:
> I'm not a huge fan of gerrymandering all moments predicated on 
> assumption, projection, not-currently-questioning, and/or 
> not-directly-experiencing (and many other statuses that fall under 
> what we might just as well call "knowing") together into a 
> homogenous pile called "Faith."  It seems to me that the inference 
> from the fact that one doesn't "need proof through the night that the 
> sun will rise in the morning" to that that's "no different from the 
> certainty in a perpetual motion machine in a mountain" is a 
> conceptual blurring that ceases to pay dividends quickly.  I think it 
> might be important to see the analogies between the epistemological 
> status of something called "faith" and other statuses (like the 
> unquestioned assumptions involved in predictive knowing), but it 
> doesn't tell you much about what is special about "faith" as a status.  
> And you need to do that in order to say anything interesting about the 
> cultural and political controversies that have always surrounded 
> religious experience.  (I've tried to move toward one picture of that 
> here: http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2009/07/spatial-model-of-belief-change.html)
> 
> Matt                         
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